The JSE Investment Challenge gives high school learners and university students a virtual R1-million portfolio to invest in JSE-listed shares in a simulated trading environment. Coronation’s Top Investor Challenge: Schools Edition gives high school learners a risk-free way to make investment choices based on future scenarios. The Allan Gray Entrepreneurship Challenge (Agec), which turns 10 this year, uses a 30-minute online business simulation game to introduce pupils to entrepreneurship.
South Africa has a youth unemployment crisis, but it also has a preparation crisis. Too many learners leave school without a clear bridge into further study, formal work or self-employment. The result is not only an income problem. It also creates problems around confidence, decision-making skills and missed opportunities.
Allan Gray Entrepreneurship Challenge
For Charleen Duncan, head of public affairs and communications at the Allan Gray Orbis Foundation, the past decade of the Allan Gray Entrepreneurship Challenge (Agec) has shown that the issue is not a lack of entrepreneurial ability among young people.
“There’s a lot of potential, but there are not a lot of opportunities,” Duncan says.
That is the idea behind Agec, which was launched in 2016 and celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. The programme reaches learners across South Africa, Namibia, Botswana and Eswatini and often attracts more than 21,000 learners and more than 800 teachers annually.
At its simplest, Agec is an online business simulation game. Learners are placed in charge of building and running a small retail business. This year’s theme, Food Frenzy, asks them to make decisions about stock, marketing, staff, ethics, reputational risk and strategy.
It takes about 30 minutes to complete, but learners are encouraged to replay the game to improve their scores and test different approaches. The repetition is part of the learning. In a classroom, a wrong answer can feel final. In a simulation, a bad business decision becomes another round.
Duncan says Agec has shown that pupils from very different backgrounds will engage with entrepreneurship when the opportunity is made accessible.
Entrepreneurship is often treated as something that belongs in a business studies textbook, or as a last resort when formal employment fails. Agec is built on a broader definition. It is not only trying to produce future business owners, but also to teach learners to think differently.
“Entrepreneurship basically teaches you just to think differently. It teaches you that you have agency, that you can identify opportunities and that you can create value,” Duncan says.
That is where Agec starts to overlap with the investment challenges run by the JSE and Coronation. Whether a learner is choosing stock for a virtual shop or deciding how to allocate a virtual portfolio, the lesson is partly about money, but mostly about judgement.
In the JSE Investment Challenge, learners and students have to decide how to invest a virtual R1-million portfolio in JSE-listed shares. The competition, which began on 16 March and closes on 15 September 2026, introduces participants to real market behaviour without exposing them to real losses.
Coronation’s Top Investor Challenge: Schools Edition
Now in its second year, Coronation’s Top Investor Challenge: Schools Edition is open to high school learners across South Africa. Learners participate in teams, receive a virtual pot of money and make investment decisions based on future scenarios presented through short videos. The team whose portfolio grows the most by the end of the challenge wins.
Both competitions are designed to turn markets from something foggy and intimidating into something learners can prod, question and begin to understand.
In an earlier interview with Daily Maverick, Kirshni Totaram, Coronation’s global head of institutional business, said high school was not too early to start teaching young people about money.
“You can never start learning about financial literacy too early,” Totaram said. “The more you talk about money, the earlier you talk about money, about discipline, about budgets, about long-term wealth creation… the easier it is to demystify it.”
The investment challenges teach concepts such as risk, diversification, patience and the difference between short-term noise and information that could affect long-term value. Agec teaches a parallel set of business instincts: when to buy stock, how to market, how to treat staff, how to recover from failure and how to think about reputational risk.
Duncan says those skills are relevant even if learners never start a business.
“In a school environment, you are not taught to take risk. There’s a right and there’s a wrong answer,” she says. “How do we start teaching young people to be job creators?”
Teacher training
Over the past decade, Agec has grown beyond the online competition. It now includes CAPS-aligned lesson plans, teacher training, entrepreneurship clubs, the Startup Shuff…
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