Some forms of intelligence begin with learning how to breathe.
In Khayelitsha, South Africa, Earthchild Project gives thousands of children something every human being deserves: the tools to understand themselves, care for each other and imagine a different future.
June 1, 2026 · 5 min read · By RHISE
Sakumlandela Primary, Khayelitsha, February 2026.
For years, people across the RHISE community have supported, visited and shared the work of Earthchild Project. This is the first story we are telling here, and there is a reason it comes first. What we build matters. What we contribute matters too. Engineering abundance means making sure more people get to experience it.
Why Earthchild matters to us
We spend our days thinking about intelligence. How technology can help someone understand their body, protect their attention, reflect, breathe and become more conscious of how they live.
Long before RHISE existed, Earthchild was teaching many of those same principles in a radically different environment. Inside schools across Khayelitsha and Lavender Hill, children learn yoga and meditation. They grow food. They spend time in nature. They learn leadership, emotional awareness and responsibility. Not because these things are luxuries, but because sometimes they are lifelines.
The yoga pledge on a classroom wall, and one of the children who say it.
Earthchild has worked inside the same schools since 2007, building its model on long term relationships rather than temporary interventions. Today it reaches more than 4,000 children and around 150 teachers across eight schools. One idea sits underneath all of it: a child who can connect with themselves can begin to change what comes next.
2007Founded in Cape Town
8Schools in Khayelitsha and Lavender Hill
4,000+Children reached
150+Teachers reached
We went there to visit. We left carrying something with us.
In February 2026, our team travelled to Khayelitsha. We sat on yoga mats beside the children. We walked through the gardens they tend. We listened, we laughed, we danced, and eventually some of us cried. Because there is something different about seeing what resilience looks like before it becomes a statistic.
The Earthchild garden at Sakumlandela Primary, built with Urban Harvest.
Some of these children grow up surrounded by realities no child should have to normalise. Earthchild works in communities where children can face gangsterism, substance abuse, poverty and instability, and it creates spaces within that reality where they can feel safe, breathe, move, learn and belong.
The most powerful part is what happens next. The practice doesn’t stay inside the classroom. Children take it home. They teach siblings and friends. Some teach their parents and grandparents. And children who once entered the programme are now returning as young leaders, helping the next generation find their own path.
Sometimes impact looks like a child choosing a yoga mat instead of the street.
Love and respect, painted on the walls of the school.
This is personal to us
I was born in Cameroon. Africa is not an abstract idea to me. It is where my story began.
Every time I return to the continent, I am reminded that talent, imagination, joy and human potential are distributed everywhere, while opportunity still isn’t.
What moved me about Earthchild wasn’t simply what they were giving these children. In many ways, after visiting the school for several years now, I’ve realised that the children are the ones giving something to those of us who visit the township.
We go there to support, and somehow, we leave feeling supported. We go to give, and somehow, we become the receivers. We leave with more life.
They remind us that life is worth celebrating, regardless of the conditions. They remind us of what is already there: the laughter, the intelligence, the rhythm, the curiosity, the dreams.
The incredible work of Janna Kretzmar, Noks Jada and the rest of the Earthchild team is about creating beautiful containers, spaces where these essential elements of the human experience can be protected, nurtured and given room to grow.
That is a mission worth carrying forward.
Samy SamandjeuCo-Founder, RHISE AI
A relationship built over years
Our relationship with Earthchild didn’t begin with RHISE. Andy Loy, our CEO, has supported the organisation for years and played a role in helping establish EarthChild e.V. in Germany, creating a structure through which people and organisations in Europe could support the work in South Africa more easily. He helped bring investors and supporters into the community, mobilised funding, and contributed to building the organisational foundation behind that European support.
Over the years, that relationship expanded outward. Friends came. Partners came. Investors donated. Team members came. And each visit created another person who understood why this work mattered.
That became part of the ritual: when possible, don’t just tell people about Earthchild. Bring them there. Let them meet the children and the people doing the work every day. Let them understand where the support goes. Let them feel it themselves.
Every time we return to Earthchild, we try not to simply visit, but to participate. We sit on the mats and practise yoga and meditation together, play football, put on music, dance, laugh and spend time in the gardens. Over the years, our community has also helped build and support these gardens, creating spaces where children can grow food, learn about nature and experience the joy of seeing something they cared for come to life.
Somewhere in all of this, the distinction between visitors and hosts disappears. We are simply people playing, building, breathing, dancing and being present together. These days have often given us far more than we could ever bring with us, reminding us that abundance is not always something you create.
Sometimes it is something you experience together.
Technology should move humanity forward. But humanity has to remain the point.
RHISE exists to build intelligent systems that help human beings live healthier, happier and more intentional lives. Supporting organisations like Earthchild reminds us what that mission means beyond software. More agency. More consciousness. More opportunity. More people able to become who they already have the potential to be.
That is abundance.
Support Earthchild Project
Every contribution goes directly to Earthchild Project and the children and teachers it works with in Khayelitsha and Lavender Hill.
