It is the primary aim of every newspaper (we assume) to grow its readership. Being a community newspaper, we also looked for ways to add value to our products. We needed to create a culture of reading, whilst at the same time doing name branding of our flagship product, the Limpopo Mirror. In our market, this is not that easy. To fully understand our motivation for designing the Science of Life supplements, the reader must consider the following statistics.

1. There are approximately 1 000 000 people living in our distribution area.
2. 50% of this figure are children aged 18 and under.
3. 25% of the people are totally illiterate – a further 25% only have a primary school certificate
4. Only 12,6% of the people are formally employed.
5. In the five years from 1996-2001 the population in our region increased by roughly 100 000.

Recent studies indicate that in 2004, roughly 90 000 teachers nationally were not sufficiently qualified to teach foundation phase subjects effectively.

Also bear in mind that educational resources in our distribution region are minimal to say the least, and many of our schools are poor, having no access to basic requirements like water, let alone classrooms, textbooks or stationery. It is not uncommon for learners to write on discarded cardboard boxes, or to find 60 children receiving instruction under a tree.

Zoutnet thus embarked on a mission to provide our readers with an educational supplement of some sort, that we could insert into our newspapers for a fixed period. A simple mission, you might think, until you try to obtain effective, quality material at a reasonable price. Quickly one discovers that you may have embarked on a mission impossible, when after various fruitless attempts to obtain material from accredited sources, and after many meetings with corporates, and after spending lengthy periods of frustrating hours searching the internet, you discover that nothing is available, or when it is, it will cost you an exorbitant amount to purchase the material.

We at Zoutnet, however, are of a stubborn nature, hence we were left with no alternative but to produce our own material.

Here in lies the beauty of it all…. Now that we have created the material, we are free to do with it whatever we want…. so we have decided to make it available FREE to any other institution, or body, or person, or school, or teacher, or other newspaper, IN THE WHOLE WORLD, who may find it useful