The FW de Klerk Foundation is proud to participate in Money Smart Week South Africa 2026. Through its Constitutional Advancement Programme, the Foundation is contributing a new practical guide, accompanying articles and videos, and in-person engagement. Together, these activities connect financial capability with constitutional citizenship and place useful, everyday action at the centre of the week.

At the centre of the Foundation’s contribution is The Power of Financial Possibility: South Africa’s 2026 Constitutional Money Guide – A Practical Guide for Young South Africans. Presented in both a full-length and a ten-page edition, the report begins with the decisions people make about money and ends with the constitutional conditions that make genuine choice possible.

The guide is organised around five movements: Learn, Earn, Keep, Grow and Shape. Learn turns information into judgement; Earn considers how work becomes reliable income; Keep focuses on protection, fraud prevention and redress; Grow connects saving to resilient ownership; and Shape asks how taxes, budgets and public services affect household opportunity. Together, the five movements offer a practical route from understanding a price to questioning what public money is doing.

Financial freedom is too often described as a private achievement alone. The report recognises personal responsibility while refusing to treat structural barriers as personal failure. Dignity, equality, access to information, freedom of trade, privacy, access to justice, property rights and accountable public finance all help determine whether knowledge can be used, income can be earned, harm can be remedied and assets can be built.

Ismail Joosub, Manager of Constitutional Advancement at the FW de Klerk Foundation, said: “Money Smart Week gives us an opportunity to treat financial education not as a list of slogans, but as practical constitutional work. Young people should be able to read a contract, understand the true cost of credit, protect their financial identity, build an asset and ask where public money goes. The aim is to turn possibility into decisions people can use.”

The Foundation’s Money Smart Week programme centres on four practical formats: the report, focused articles, short videos and in-person engagement. The articles draw out key lessons from the report. The videos make central ideas easier to understand and share, while personal engagement creates room for questions, discussion and practical application. Each format carries the same message: financial capability grows when information is clear, action is realistic and institutions are accountable.

The Foundation invites young people, households, educators, financial institutions and public bodies to engage with the report and the wider Money Smart Week conversation. The power of possible becomes meaningful when people can learn what money is doing, earn with purpose, keep what must be protected, grow future choice and shape the public conditions in which freedom is exercised.

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Issued by Ismail Joosub on behalf of the FW de Klerk Foundation
Johannesburg