Most coverage of Threads for iKasi Foundation starts with a handover: the jerseys, the learners, the day. This interview starts somewhere less photogenic, behind a shop counter in Tembisa, and it is the more useful place to begin.
The Foundation started with something she noticed at work
Khabo Mnguni opened the ZS Uniforms retail store in 2022 and began working in it full time. She describes growing up with working parents and a model C education, and says that as a child she did not fully register that other children were not in the same position.
Standing behind that counter changed what she could see. Learners were coming in with torn uniforms, torn socks and torn shoes. Some had no school jersey at all. Her reaction, in her own telling, was immediate: there is something we need to do here.
Fudumala came first, the Foundation came after
The response in 2023 was the Fudumala school jersey drive, run then as an initiative of ZS Uniforms rather than a separate organisation. It raised funds and delivered 90 jerseys. That was the proof that the need was real and that the model worked.
Threads for iKasi Foundation was registered afterwards. The order matters. The Foundation was not a plan that went looking for a problem. It was built around a problem that had already been answered once, at small scale, successfully.
Why Tembisa first, and why not only Tembisa
Tembisa was the obvious starting point, and Khabo gives three reasons for it: it is where she grew up, it is where the business operates, and it is the community that supported her grandparents, who were entrepreneurs there and built a retail complex in the 1980s, before it supported her.
The work has since travelled. She describes an initiative in the Eastern Cape, taken there with Standard Bank's transactional banking department, that reached 109 learners across two schools. How communities are chosen depends largely on the partners the Foundation works with and the funding available, and her stated ambition is to reach every community in South Africa and beyond its borders.
The jerseys have to be made by someone
A handover only happens because a garment exists, and at ZS Uniforms that side of the work is led by Khosi Nkoko, Khabo's cousin, the Secretary of Threads for iKasi Foundation and the COO of ZS Uniforms. She is a fashion designer with more than twelve years in the garment industry, specialising in apparel design and production, and she spent a decade founding and running her own label, Unbuttond Clothing, before joining the business.
When ZS Uniforms brought manufacturing in house in December 2024, Khosi took charge of it. In the interview Khabo does not hedge about her role: she calls Khosi the heart and the lifeline of production. Every jersey and full uniform the Foundation hands over passes through that workroom.
Doing more than a jersey
Khabo is direct about the fact that many organisations run uniform initiatives, and about the decision to do something slightly different. Rather than jerseys alone, Threads for iKasi Foundation adds full school uniforms and toiletries where funding allows, so a learner receives more than one item and the question of dignity is answered more completely.
Watch the full conversation
The Foundation is one part of a longer story. The rest of the interview covers Khabo's 13 years in corporate, registering the business in 2020, resigning in August 2022, and bringing uniform manufacturing in house in December 2024. That side of it is covered in full on the ZS Uniforms news page.
Interview credit: Silindo Mabena, podcaster, YouTuber and qualified HR professional. Watch more on the Silindo Mabena YouTube channel.
Quotations and figures on this page are drawn from the recorded interview and lightly edited for clarity. Watch the full episode above for the conversation in context.