Paul Esterhuizen

for school and charity beneficiaries across South Africa. MySchool has, over the years, received global recognition (and numerous awards) for their work on the concept.

Paul Esterhuizen founded MySchool around the turn of the millennium, seeking a more efficient way to raise funds for his children’s school. The concept quickly grew into a formal business initiative embodied by the MySchool Card, which thousands of South African families swipe each week at partner merchants. In the years since, the program blossomed into a nationwide initiative that raises some 7 million rand (R7 million) each month for hundreds of South African schools and charities, enabling ordinary people to provide quality educational opportunities for their children.

After stepping back from MySchool, Esterhuizen founded three education-related initiatives and remains involved with each: Safer Schools, Safer Internet South Africa, and School-Days®.

Safer Schools is a free online compliance management program that helps pre-primary, primary, and secondary schools across South Africa provide information, resources, and support to improve health, safety, and emergency preparedness. Safer Schools’ digitized resource portfolio includes operational checklists for first aid, fire prevention, and site inspection, as well as health and safety incident reports and a compliance management toolkit.

“Making schools aware of the importance of establishing protocols to address possible emergency situations and response procedures has always been the Safer Schools mantra,” says Esterhuizen.

Esterhuizen grew Safer Internet South Africa, a digital literacy initiative, through a partnership with the South African Film and Publication Board (FPB). Safer Internet South Africa provides content resources and support for parents, educators, and children, with the dual aims of protecting young people from premature exposure to age-inappropriate situations and eliminating child exploitation.

Finally, School-Days is an education rewards and incentives program funded in the main by Skybound Capital. With Esterhuizen currently serving as its CEO, School-Days helps parents provide financial assistance to South African schools — both their children’s own and other schools they’ve chosen to “adopt” — at no direct cost through purchases with preferred merchants known as School-Days Earn Partners.

“We built School-Days [on the] understanding that the time that a child will spend at school can be factored as a 'cost per day' for the time to be educated,” says Esterhuizen. “Parents know that “the conception and subsequent birth of a child triggers a calculation of 'what is this going to cost us.'” School-Days, he says, has a simple mission: to make that cost easier for parents of all incomes and backgrounds to bear.

Paul Esterhuizen is a lifelong resident of Johannesburg. He lives with his wife Dianne not far from his childhood home; the couple has three adult children and four grandchildren. When Esterhuizen isn’t hard at work, he enjoys spending time with his family and traveling.