9,674 Kids. 74 Lessons. What Our Own Platform Just Taught Us. We’re creating consumers, not contributors
By Theo Kitshoff, Co-founder & CEO, Sticitt
I want to write today about two numbers from our own platform that I have found genuinely difficult to sit with.
9,674 children are currently active on Sticitt, receiving money from their parents. Only 74 of them have a lesson attached to that money.
To make sure the weight of those numbers lands: Sticitt was designed from day one to be more than a payment platform. It was built to help South African families move from a fixed-allowance model — money handed over on a schedule, regardless of effort — to a value-linked model, where children experience the direct connection between what they contribute and what they earn. We have lessons. Chore-linked payments. Savings goals. Structured earn-and-reward flows. All of it is built. All of it is available. And of the 9,674 kids currently on the platform, 9,600 are receiving money with none of it attached.
That is less than 1% engagement with the lessons that are the entire reason we built the product.
Let me be honest about what I felt when I first saw those numbers. Disappointment, briefly. Then a much more useful emotion: recognition. Because 9,600-out-of-9,674 is not a critique of our parents. It is a critique of us, and of a much older pattern that predates Sticitt by generations.
The pattern is bigger than our platform
The FSCA and HSRC's 2020 Baseline Financial Literacy Survey — the definitive nationally representative study of South African adult financial literacy — found that only 51% of South African adults are financially literate. The average adult score was 52 out of 100. 46% of respondents said they "live for today rather than worry about providing for their future." 44% were not actively saving. A third had no retirement plan at all.
Those are the outcomes. Our 9,600 children receiving money without lessons is one of the mechanisms, measured live, inside real households, in 2026.
Nearly every South African parent I know wants their child to be better with money than they are. They say it out loud. They mean it. And then, every Friday afternoon, they do the same thing their parents did — hand over an amount, no strings attached, on autopilot. Not because they do not care. Because caring, on its own, does not change the muscle memory of how money moves in a household.
That is what our data is showing. Intent without infrastructure produces the same outcome as no intent at all.
Money without lessons builds consumers
There is a phrase I have been using internally for a while, and I am ready to use it publicly now.
Money without lessons builds consumers. Money with lessons builds contributors.
When a child receives money on a schedule, regardless of effort, they absorb a specific mental model: that income is something the world owes them in exchange for existence. They become consumers of money. They spend it, they enjoy it, and they learn nothing about how it is created.
When a child receives money in exchange for effort, contribution, or a completed lesson, they absorb a different mental model entirely. They become contributors. They begin to associate income with value created, and value created with problem-solving. They start to negotiate. They start to make trade-offs. They start to think like the economic actors they will need to be for the next sixty years of their lives.
This is not a moral judgement. It is a practical observation. The South African economy our children are entering rewards contributors and struggles to accommodate consumers. Youth unemployment currently exceeds 46% for South Africans aged 15 to 34. Roughly 12 million South African adults are over-indebted, and 75% of recent borrowers used credit to cover basic needs like food. Only around 5% of South Africans will be able to retire comfortably.
Every one of those adults was, at some point, a child who was handed money without being taught what to do with it.
Why is this happening on a platform built to prevent it?
This is the honest question I have been asking my team all week. If our whole product is designed around this shift, why has the shift not happened for 9,600 out of 9,674 children currently on the platform?
Three reasons, and I will name them plainly because being transparent about our own product gaps is more useful than pretending they do not exist.
First, the default beats the option. In our current product, "just top up your child's balance" is the fastest, easiest path. Lessons, chore-linked transfers, and savings goals exist — but they take extra taps. In behavioural science, the default wins almost every time. When we set up a system where the fixed-allowance model is the path of least resistance, that is the model most parents will take, even when they philosophically prefer the alternative.
Second, we have under-communicated the "why". We built the lessons. We did not, until this analysis, quantify what happens when they are not used. Parents cannot make an informed trade-off if they have not been shown what is at stake. This blog post is, in part, us correcting that.
Third, changing a household routine is genuinely hard. Even the most intentional parents in our user base are running a household while working full-time, and money conversations often get deferred to "when things settle down." They rarely settle down. What we need to build is not another feature that requires setting aside a Sunday afternoon. It is a set of defaults that make the intentional path the easy path.
What we are doing about it
Three shifts, starting immediately.
Product-level. Q4 will see meaningful changes to our parent transfer flow. Lessons and chore-linked payments will become significantly more visible — not buried three menus deep, but presented as the default option every time a parent moves money to a child. If a parent wants to send a straight fixed transfer, they still can, but the interface will make the lesson-linked alternative equally easy.
Education-level. Every partner school will receive a communications pack in Q4 addressing the "money for nothing" pattern directly. Parents cannot change what they have not been shown. We will show them, using the same data I have shared in this article, and give them concrete, practical alternatives that fit inside a busy family week.
Transparency-level. From Q1 2027, we will publish our own lesson-adoption metrics quarterly. 74 out of 9,674 is the starting number. Every quarter after that, we will report publicly on how much we have moved it. If we cannot move it, we should be publicly accountable for that too.
The bigger point
The most valuable thing our own platform data has taught me this year is this: building the right tools is necessary, but it is not sufficient. Having intent is necessary, but it is not sufficient. What actually changes generational financial behaviour is default architecture — the small, daily infrastructure decisions about which path is the easy one.
We built Sticitt to make the right path easier. Our own data shows that we have not made it easy enough. That is a fixable problem, and we are fixing it.
The children whose parents shift from money for nothing to money for something this year will enter adulthood with a fundamentally different relationship to work, value, and reward than the generation before them. That is not a marketing claim. It is the entire thesis of our company, and we are going to build the product until the data proves it.
Sources:
Sticitt internal platform data, 2026. FSCA/HSRC 2020 Baseline Financial Literacy Survey. UN South Africa Country Profile 2026. Consumer indebtedness data, May 2025.
When in doubt, paddle out.
