If you want one year of prosperity, grow grain.

If you want ten years of prosperity, grow trees.

If you want one hundred years of prosperity,

grow people.

CHINESE PROVERB

SAEP is a fifteen-year old project dedicated to helping children and young adults in South Africa’s historically disadvantaged township communities develop their academic and life skills, obtain productive employment, and contribute as leaders to the economic and social development of their communities and their country.

It consists of two sister non-profit organizations, SAEP USA, a US-based 501(c)(3) charitable corporation founded in 1994, and SAEP (SA) a registered South African non-profit organization (NPO) and public benefit organization (PB0) registered in 2003. The former is governed by a Board of Directors in the USA; the latter by a Management Committee based in Cape Town

SAEP has been working for ten years in the severely under-resourced black townships of Cape Town (primarily Philippi, Samora Machel, Nyanga East, and New Crossroads). The population SAEP works with consists largely of families who are recent economic refugees from the impoverished rural areas of the Eastern Cape Province. The problems facing these communities are high rates of unemployment (probably at least 40 percent in these particular areas); crime; HIV/AIDS and TB; domestic violence; sexual abuse; and teenage pregnancy.

SAEP began its activities in Cape Town at Sinethemba Senior Secondary School, a high school in the township of Philippi, in 1998 with an environmental education and awareness project. That project evolved over the years to include a variety of educational projects at the high school level, as well as a pre-school support program, a bridging year programme for recent township high school graduates, and support for promising graduates of the bridging year who have gone on to tertiary education.