A private school in the South African countryside has turned to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to raise funds for its scholarship programme that caters to children from disadvantaged communities in the area.
Located in a country village that is roughly a 2-hour drive from Cape Town, South Africa, Greyton House Village School, minted its first collection of NFTs in February 2022. Eight of these have already been sold with the latest fetching $300 on the OpenSea NFT marketplace.
The institution has at least 35 of its students on full or part scholarships that are annually fundraised for so the NFTs are helping to facilitate this program with 100% of funds going to keeping scholarship children in school.
The first few pieces were sold for $250 each (about 0.1 ETH by then) and while this may not seem like a lot of money, it is worth noting that this covers one month’s school fees for a pupil at the school. With this logic, the school principal, Marli Hoffman, highlighted an intention to sell more NFTs to support more children and cut down on the waiting list for applications. She considers education the only way to change the trajectory of poverty in South Africa from the bottom up.
Under the guidance of a local artist called Dina Kuijers, the school has a thriving art department that allows the children to express themselves through art and develop creative pieces. With the permission of the students who draw the initial artpieces, NFTs are generated from artwork done and then sold for the cause. The pieces are created using mixed media (pencils, pens and other colouring materials) on paper which are then digitized and minted as NFTs on OpenSea.
In a stroke of good fortune, a parent from the school, Wesley Blake, happens to be a blockchain developer and helps with the technical aspects involved to mint the NFTs onto the OpenSea platform.
As the school continues to add to its NFT collection, a 5% royalty cost has been included and this returns to the scholarship fund whenever the NFTs are resold in the future. The School Principal is optimistic that this will create a passive stream of income to flow into the scholarship program pool.
The Greyton House NFT collection can be found here with another collection in the works that is said to feature digitally rendered 3D mobiles to be sold as 3D GIF NFTs.