June 3, 2026
A child who is good with his hands is not a lesser child. A country that cannot train its own tradesmen cannot build anything that lasts. Those two sentences are why Berman Brothers Group runs an education foundation, and they are the same reason we are careful about who pours a slab on one of our sites.
People ask why a property developer would put its money and its founders' time into schools. The honest answer is that it is not charity bolted onto a building company. It is one problem looked at from both ends. The skills shortage that makes it hard to find a competent electrician in Cape Town is the same shortage that shows up later as a badly finished building. So when you ask what the Hands On Foundation tells you about how we build, the answer is: quite a lot. We treat the people the way we treat the work. We try to build both to last.
Our founder Saul Berman can say this with more authority than most, because he was the child the system wrote off.
Saul left school early. He was told he was a failure, and for a long time he believed it. He is dyslexic, with what would today be recognised as ADHD, at a time when none of that came with a name that helped. What kept him from going the wrong way was a place that accepted him. He sang in a synagogue choir for nineteen years, and that was where he first understood belonging.
To get to Maitland Technical College he took a bus, then a train, then walked. He was thrown out three times and begged to be kept. He had never done maths or science, because his school offered only the academic stream, so he promised the principal he would take extra lessons. He took them. "I could hardly read," he says, "but I have always been good with figures." After his N1 he earned a distinction in maths and science, over eighty percent, and went on to finish N1 through N4, matric and the first year of university, in a system that had already decided he would not.
There was a lecturer at the college who told him, plainly, that he would not make it. When the results came back, the same man could not hide how proud he was, and told Saul he would work for him one day. About three years later, after Saul had opened his own business, that lecturer came to run its electrical division. He stayed a year, then asked to be released to take a job with the city council that he had wanted his whole life. Saul let him go. "I don't want anybody working with me who doesn't want to be here," he says.
Twenty years later, BBG was building the The Point Mall in Sea Point. While the site was being undermined, the entire electrical metering room blew. It was a Friday afternoon, and it cut power to several blocks in an area where many Jewish families were preparing for the Sabbath. The city council was already on the road outside. The man in charge turned out to be Saul's old lecturer. Saul phoned him. The man asked who was calling. Saul told him it was his boss. Within half an hour there were generators running, the road was lit, and power was back on temporarily. After the lecturer retired, Saul arranged for him to teach again at a technical school. From a man who said he would not make it, to the two of them closing that circle on a Sea Point pavement.
The Hands On Foundation grew out of that history. In 2018 we transformed the Engineering and Design Faculty at Wynberg Boys High School in Cape Town, putting engineering, electronics, design, and construction inside an ordinary academic school rather than in a separate, stigmatised technical institution. We work in partnership with LEAP Schools. Across two schools this year, more than a hundred pupils in grades ten and eleven are in the programme.
The part we are proudest of is the simplest. The grade tens come onto our building sites at least twice a term. Last year one group watched a building demolished, a site excavated and shored with lateral support, a structure rise, and a finished building handed over. This year their building-plans curriculum is not a textbook. It is our live Mont Reve site, with a camera the pupils can watch every day to follow the progress. The grade elevens will finish their first built model at school this year. That combination of theory and practice does not exist anywhere outside this, because outside school there is nowhere to learn both at once.
This matters more than it sounds. Since 1994, technical subjects like woodwork and metalwork were quietly stripped out of many mainstream curriculums, leaving a generation gifted with their hands no outlet for it. The numbers have moved one way since. Stats SA put youth unemployment, for those aged fifteen to thirty-four, at 45.8 percent in the first quarter of 2026, and at 60.9 percent for the fifteen to twenty-four group. When those figures were released, the Minister of Employment and Labour asked the private sector to help with skills and pathways into work. Saul's view on how it came to this is blunt: the central failure in government education is accountability, and the Western Cape has grown by well over a million people without a matching number of new schools. We went the private route, not to work around government, but because the country cannot afford to wait for it.
The demand is not theoretical. Ask any contractor where they find a good plumber or electrician and the answer is word of mouth and luck. AI can write an essay. It cannot wire a plug or tile a floor. As the world automates the desk, skilled hands become scarce, and scarce things become valuable. A trade is close to an international passport. We are not training our children to leave. We are training them to stay and rebuild.
" Most schools are built to push the ones who do not fit out the back and to count the ones who matriculate at the front. We are trying to build the opposite."
If there is one lesson in all of this for anyone who runs anything, it is about recognition. Saul spent years working only to be seen, because no one at home ever told him they were proud. So he greets the people on a site by name and asks after a sick child or a wife, and he will tell you that you get more from a person in a day by recognising them than by any other means. "Each child is good at something," he says, "and it is the school's job to find what that is." Most schools are built to push the ones who do not fit out the back and to count the ones who matriculate at the front. We are trying to build the opposite."
Saul's son tells him he cannot wait to walk in his footsteps. Saul tells him he does not mind that for a short while, but that one day he wants to walk in his son's shadow. That is the point of building anything properly. You do it so that what comes after you is larger than you. We cover the running costs of the foundation ourselves, so that every rand given goes to the work rather than to overheads. It is the same instinct that has us handing over apartments in person after more than thirty years. You build the people the way you build the building. You build them to outlast you.
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