About

Hello, I’m Dacod Magagula, one of the 2 founders of FoondaMate.

I went to a school in a rural township school in Mpumalanga, South Africa, that didn’t have resources.

I did not have electricity at home until I was 7. When I got to high school my brother and I decided to save all our Christmas clothes money for a computer, so we could play games. 😅

Past Papers and notes from the internet helped me get good grades in the absence of teachers and text books

My classes had 50-70 students on average. The school did not have text books, and the ones we had were shared among 2 – 3 classmates.

When I was in Grade 12, the computer was very helpful because whenever I got money to buy mobile data I downloaded past papers and any other pdf notes I could find.

This was very helpful, especially for maths and physics because I did not have teachers for most of the year.

I ended up graduating top of my matric class, got the best results in the history of my school and was the first ever from my school to get accepted into the best university in Africa. This is largely thanks to the study material I was able to download on the internet.

While in matric, I found the study material very helpful so I tried to share it with all my classmates, but they did not have computers at home or phones that could open pdfs — and we could not afford to print it out. In the end I settled for inviting my 5 closest friends to sit around my computer at home and study together.

At the University Of Cape Town (UCT) I studied computer science, and learnt how to write computer programs.

5 years after university while working as a software engineer, I learnt I could write a program that communicated using WhatsApp and the first thing I thought of was helping students like my friends get study material. 👨🏾‍💻✨

Hey, I’m Tao, the other founder of FoondaMate 👋 I got really good grades throughout school, and I always believed everyone else could too. I also graduated top of my class. But my story’s a little different.

I went to schools where resources were not a limitation. My classes had about 12 students per class. I was accepted to UCT with a few other class mates and most of my classmates went on to study further. The only limit to how well my classmates could do were their ambitions.

At university, it became a lot clearer to me that there were lots of other students in the world, just as brilliant as my classmates whose limits were that they did not have the resources they needed. So when Dacod told me about his idea to get students past papers on WhatsApp I got really excited, and we started building FoondaMate together.

I was really excited about the doors that studying had opened for me. But I wanted to find a way to make that possible for everyone.

And if everyone had someone to help them study then everyone would be able achieve their dreams and goals academically. So Dacod and I started building a robot that could do just that.

At first, the robot could just help with downloading past papers. But we made it smarter, so that it could explain things, help with maths, send study guides and speak different languages. Then we decided to share it with some learners and see what they thought.