Give a Byte A non-profit that turns retired company computers into school computers, run by Alex from home in Cape Town

Summary

The idea works, but not the way one might hope. Donated hardware pays for nothing; it is the raw material. Alex's salary has to come from three things: companies paying a placement fee per computer so that their donation becomes a complete, photographed, B-BBEE-recognised school project; cost-recovery sales to students, job-seekers and households who cannot buy new; and small fees for certified data destruction. At roughly R650 of parts and transport per unit and a R15,000 salary, the bench needs 35 to 45 computers a month to break even, which is one person's full output once the pipeline exists. Bootstrapped, with no vehicle, a R12,000 bench and a salary that follows the sponsorship income in year one, it needs no loan; years two and three pay her R20,000 to R24,000 a month and leave a surplus.

What makes it feasible now is the supply. Windows 10 support ended on 2025-10-14, and a large share of corporate PCs cannot run Windows 11. Axiz put the number of business PCs in South Africa older than five years at about 2.1 million in March 2025, and Xperien, the largest IT asset-disposal firm, warned donors in late 2024 that laptops older than sixth-generation Intel now have no buyback value. Companies are sitting on working machines that are worth nothing to them, cost money to dispose of lawfully, and carry data they are liable for under POPIA. A non-profit that collects, wipes with a certificate, and reports back with photos of a school lab solves three problems for the donor at once.

What makes it hard is that two things must be true before the first company will sign: Give a Byte must be a registered non-profit company with Public Benefit Organisation approval from SARS, because without it a company that donates more than R20,000 of value a year pays 20% donations tax; and it must be able to hand the donor the evidence pack a B-BBEE verification agency wants. Both are paperwork, both are free, and both take about six months, which is why the plan starts the registrations before the bench is built.

The recommendation is to go, as a pilot: register the NPC in month one, apply for PBO and Section 18A approval in month two, and run sixty donated machines through the garage by month six with one sponsoring company and one school. The pilot measures the three numbers this study has had to estimate: how many hours a machine takes, what share of a donated batch is usable, and whether companies will pay R1,000 a seat to see their old laptops in a classroom.

The idea

Give a Byte is a non-profit company (NPC) that asks companies for the computers they are retiring, refurbishes them, and places them where they do the most good: no-fee public schools first, then individuals who need a computer to study, apply for work or run a micro-business. The donor gets a certified data wipe, a Section 18A receipt, a B-BBEE socio-economic development letter, photographs of the lab, and a one-page impact report for its annual report. The school gets a working lab at no cost. The individual pays a community price that covers the parts, well under half the price of a commercial refurbished machine. Alex does the work and is paid a salary by the NPC.

It starts from home: a garage or spare room as the bench, a borrowed bakkie for collections, the first donors found through family and friends in business, the first school found by walking in. It grows by reputation among the corporate social investment managers and B-BBEE consultants who need credible beneficiaries, and by volume as the Windows 11 refresh keeps flushing hardware out of offices for the next three years.

The study assumes Alex can already open a laptop, swap a drive and install an operating system, or can learn it in a month. Nothing in the plan needs a qualification; the CompTIA A+ course would help with donors' confidence and costs about R6,000 online if she wants it later.

The name

Give a Byte says what it is and what it wants in three words; the pun is gentle enough for a corporate letterhead and warm enough for a school. It explains the ask ("give us a byte of your old kit"), it is easy to say on the phone, it works in a hashtag, and nobody in South Africa uses it: there is no NPC, NPO or trade mark of that name on the web, and both giveabyte.org.za and giveabyte.co.za are unregistered. Edward's one-word spelling, Givabyte, echoes "gigabyte" and is equally free; register both spellings in .org.za and .co.za (about R100 each a year) so that whichever people type lands on the site, and use .org.za as the canonical address because corporate donors read it as non-profit.

Before registering, reserve the name at CIPC (R50, up to four names on one form) because the company register, not the domain register, decides whether "Give a Byte NPC" is available. The study uses Give a Byte throughout.

How it works

Two rules make the loop pay. Desktops go to schools because they are robust, have no batteries, share a standard image and are cheap to repair; laptops go to individuals because that is who needs portability and who can pay a little. And nothing is given to anyone who did not ask for it: schools apply with a named teacher who will own the lab, and individuals apply with a reason, which is what keeps the beneficiary records that the B-BBEE and SARS paperwork depends on.

Printers are refused (consumables cost more than the printer), servers and network gear are sold to a reseller or scrapped, and anything older than about 2014 or without a working screen goes straight to the recycler. A donated batch is expected to yield three usable machines out of four, including repairs made with parts from the fourth; the pilot measures this.

Why companies will give

A corporate IT manager with 80 laptops that cannot run Windows 11 has three problems: the machines take up a storeroom, they hold company and customer data that POPIA says must be destroyed "in a manner that prevents its reconstruction", and the e-waste landfill ban of 2021-08-23 means they cannot simply be thrown away. An IT asset-disposal firm will take them, but Xperien, the biggest, has told the market that pre-2016 laptops now fetch nothing, and small lots are charged for. Give a Byte takes the problem away for free and sends back something the company can put in its annual report. That is reason one, and for many donors it is enough.

Reason two: B-BBEE points

Reason two is the scorecard. Every company measured under the Codes of Good Practice has a socio-economic development (SED) element: 5 points for contributions worth 1% of net profit after tax under the generic codes, and under the ICT Sector Code, which binds most IT companies and is the natural donor pool, 12 points for 1.5% of net profit after tax. Companies routinely under-spend this line because they lack beneficiaries whose paperwork survives an audit. The Codes count cash grants at 100% of value, "verifiable cost, monetary and non-monetary" at 100%, and employee time at 80%, and they count a contribution to any non-profit as long as at least 75% of the value reaches black South Africans. Who owns the non-profit is irrelevant; who benefits is everything. A programme that places computers in no-fee schools and with township job-seekers is comfortably above 75%.

The Codes also say a contribution must be linked to income generation or sustainable access to the economy, and the B-BBEE Commission lists "mere donations" and school uniforms as examples that do not qualify. Computers for a school lab and laptops for job-seekers sit on the right side of that line because Schedule 1 of the Codes names "support for education programmes, resources and materials" and "skills development for unemployed people" as SED, but Give a Byte should describe every placement in those terms, with a teacher and a purpose, never as a gift.

A worked example

An IT services company with net profit of R8 million needs R120,000 of SED a year for its 12 points. It gives Give a Byte 60 written-off laptops and pays R60,000 (R1,000 a seat) to have them refurbished, installed as a 40-seat lab in a Khayelitsha high school and 20 teacher laptops, and reported on. An independent valuation puts the laptops at R800 each, R48,000. The verification agency recognises R60,000 cash at 100% and R48,000 of verifiable non-monetary value at 100%: R108,000, or 90% of target, worth about 10.8 of 12 points. Under the generic codes the same gift exceeds the R80,000 target and earns all 5 points. A pre-2016 laptop that was about to cost the company money has become almost a tenth of its scorecard.

Reason three: tax, honestly

The tax case is weaker than donors expect, and the study says so because the first finance director will check. A Section 18A receipt lets a company deduct a donation of up to 10% of its taxable income, but for an asset the donor used in its trade the deductible value is the lower of market value and tax value, and a computer written off over three years has a tax value of nil. The deduction on the hardware is therefore nil, and the Act may treat the gift as a disposal at market value, recouping a few hundred rand of allowances per unit. The placement fee is different: R60,000 in cash to an approved PBO is fully deductible, with one catch that practitioners repeat and the Act does not spell out, which is that a company should claim the same rand either as a tax deduction or as B-BBEE SED, not both. Most donors will choose the points.

Where tax matters is donations tax. A company may give away R20,000 a year tax-free; above that it pays 20% of the market value, unless the recipient is a SARS-approved Public Benefit Organisation, in which case the donation is exempt. The 60-laptop example is R108,000 of value, so a donor giving it to an unapproved NPC would owe R17,600. Nobody will do that. PBO approval under section 30 of the Income Tax Act is therefore the hinge of the whole business, and the Section 18A approval that rides on it is what makes the cash fee deductible.

What Give a Byte must hand over

A verification agency, following the B-BBEE Commission's practice guide and the educational material it published in 2024-11, will ask the donor for: a signed SED agreement; Give a Byte's own B-BBEE sworn affidavit; a letter from Give a Byte acknowledging the contribution, its value and the percentage of black beneficiaries; a report from an independent competent person, normally the NPC's accountant, confirming that percentage; an invoice or valuation for goods; proof of payment; delivery notes with serial numbers; and a letter from the school confirming receipt. Give a Byte should produce this pack for every donation as a matter of routine, which is the real product being sold.

Give a Byte's own affidavit is free and powerful. Under the specialised-enterprise scorecard an NPC with receipts under R10 million is deemed Level 4, but one with at least 75% black beneficiaries is a Level 1 contributor on a sworn affidavit alone, valid twelve months, using the dtic template. A Level 1 supplier gives its customers 135% procurement recognition, so a company that pays Give a Byte for data destruction or collection as a service, rather than donating, scores that spend on its procurement element too.

Market and competition

Supply: the machines exist

• About 2.1 million business PCs in South Africa were more than five years old and unable to run Windows 11 in 2025-03 (Axiz). Windows 10 support ended 2025-10-14; mid-size companies take over a year to complete a refresh, so the stock flushes out of offices through 2027.
• Laptops with sixth-generation Intel chips or older have no buyback value (Xperien, late 2024). The second-hand trade will not compete for them; recyclers pay for boards by the kilogram.
• South Africa generates more than 360,000 tonnes of e-waste a year and recycles around 12% of it (DFFE, eWASA). Since 2021-05 producers of electrical equipment pay extended-producer-responsibility fees; since 2021-08-23 e-waste may not be landfilled.
• Corporate social investment was R13.1 billion in 2025, 44% of it on education, and the ICT share of education spending rose from 7% to 12% in a year (Trialogue). The money and the motive are there.

Demand: the need is not in doubt

• The Western Cape has 1,477 public schools with about 1.2 million learners. 975 are no-fee schools, 658 of them in quintiles 1 to 3 (DBE 2025 list).
• 572 Western Cape public schools, 39% of them, have no computer centre; nationally two schools in three have none (DBE EFMS 2023). The provincial eLearning programme has put smart classrooms and broadband into most schools, but its model is a screen and a device for the teacher, not computers for learners, so a donated lab complements it rather than duplicating it.
• Only 27% of households own a computer, and under 6% in the poorest fifth (Stats SA GHS 2021). Students, job-seekers and home businesses in that fifth are the community-price customers.
• A commercial refurbished eighth-generation i5 laptop costs R4,500 to R6,000 in 2026; a refurbished i5 desktop R4,700 to R7,800. A community price of R1,200 to R2,000 is a different market.

Competition: a few names, and a gap

No Western Cape non-profit was found that collects from companies with a certified wipe and an 18A receipt, refurbishes, and places machines free in no-fee schools. The two organisations that do this nationally are in Johannesburg and prefer large, young fleets. The gap is a Cape Town organisation that will take 10 to 30 old desktops from a mid-sized firm, do the paperwork properly, and show the firm a classroom within a month.

Legal set-up and compliance

Everything below is free or nearly free; the cost is time and tidiness. The order matters: the company first, then SARS, then the Department of Social Development, because SARS wants the founding document and DSD wants the company number.

Operations at home

The bench

A garage or a room of about 20 m² with a workbench, two metal shelving units, an anti-static mat, a four-bay drive dock for wiping, a bench PC that boots the imaging server, and crates for intake, in-progress, done and scrap. Nothing fancy: the whole kit is under R20,000 and half of it can be begged from the first donor. A small UPS keeps the wipe running through a power cut. The front door is not a shop: individuals collect from a library, a school or a community centre on a fixed afternoon, which keeps strangers away from the house and keeps the by-law happy.

The process per machine

With half her week on the bench and half on collections, school visits, donor meetings and paperwork, Alex can turn out 12 to 15 machines a week, about 50 to 60 a month, once donations arrive steadily. Year one will run at half that while the pipeline is built. Installing a 20-seat lab is a day with a helper; a school lab is also where a donor's photographs come from, so the installation day is a small event with the principal and the donor's people.

Stock and logistics

Fifty machines in crates is about 4 m³, which fits a single garage with the car outside. A collection of 20 desktops with monitors is one bakkie load; hiring one is R500 to R750 a day in Cape Town, and a donor's own driver often does the delivery because the donor wants the photo. No vehicle is bought at any stage: the plan is to hire by the day, borrow, and let donors deliver. A 12 m² storage unit in the northern suburbs costs about R1,450 a month and is in the year-three budget only in case the garage overflows. Scrap goes to the recycler monthly; circuit boards fetch R40 to R100 a kilogram, which pays for the trip and no more.

Software and records

Edward can host the website on the existing infrastructure for nothing. The records that matter are three registers: assets (every serial from intake to fate), beneficiaries (every school and individual, with the evidence of who they are), and donors (agreements, receipts, evidence packs). Kept well from day one, these registers are the B-BBEE affidavit, the SARS returns and the annual report; kept badly they are the reason a donor's auditor rejects the contribution.

Unit economics

The numbers below are the author's estimates from 2026 retail prices and the practice of comparable organisations; the pilot replaces them with measurements. A "unit" is one refurbished computer handed to a beneficiary. Four donated machines yield three units: the fourth supplies parts and goes to the recycler.

With 55% of units going to schools and 45% sold at the community price, and the data-destruction fee and scrap spread across all intake, the contribution per refurbished unit after direct costs is:

Every unsponsored school seat costs R650 of parts and brings in nothing, so the sponsorship rate is the single most important commercial number in the plan. The honest way to run it is to place in schools only what sponsors and surplus allow, and to let the queue of applying schools be visible on the website, which is itself a sales tool.

Alex's pay and break-even

An NPC may pay a director or employee "reasonable remuneration for services rendered", and SARS allows a PBO to pay salaries that are "not excessive" for the sector, with the burden on the organisation to show it. Both are satisfied by a written employment contract, a board minute setting the pay, payslips, and a salary in line with the market. In Cape Town in 2026 an early-career IT support technician earns a median of about R10,300 a month, a hardware technician about R12,900, a mid-career technician about R16,600, and an early-career non-profit programme manager about R22,900 (PayScale). Alex will be doing all three jobs.

The plan pays R15,000 a month on average in year one (R12,000 while the pipeline is built, more once sponsors sign), R20,000 in year two and R24,000 in year three, plus 1% UIF. A rule of thumb for the board: her salary should stay under about 35% of income, which it does from year two. If she needs more sooner, the honest answer is to keep a part-time job through year one.

Thirty to forty-five machines a month is one person's steady output. The plan is therefore feasible but tight on the current assumptions: it pays a modest salary at full output and nothing at half output. Three levers move it. Grants (the National Lotteries Commission gives up to R500,000 to small organisations; DG Murray Trust, the City's grants-in-aid, and the corporate foundations of MTN and Telkom fund digital inclusion) are not in the break-even at all and would cover a quarter of the costs if one lands. A second pair of hands at R8,000 a month roughly doubles output for a third more cost. And a sponsorship price of R1,500 a seat, still well under Astute's R2,500, lifts the contribution per unit by about R275 and cuts the break-even to 30 a month.

Projections

Three scenarios over three years. They differ in how fast donations arrive and how many school seats sponsors pay for. All use the same prices and the R650 direct cost; grants are included only where it would be odd not to expect one by then.

In the base case the NPC pays Alex R15,000, R20,000 and R24,000 a month over the three years, places about 1,000 computers in schools, sells about 840 to individuals at a third of the market price, and keeps roughly 2,500 machines out of landfill. A surplus in an NPC is not profit for anyone; it is retained for the next year, which is how the helper, a bigger parts float and a reserve for a slow month get paid for. No vehicle is bought at any point. Year one is the bootstrap year, and that is the next section.

Start-up cost and funding

This is a bootstrap. Nothing is bought that a donor would throw away, no vehicle is bought at any stage, and the company spends its first rand only when the first donor has signed. The cash list below is what has to be paid for; the second list is what the first corporate donor is asked for, because offices clearing a floor are discarding desks, shelving, crates, monitors and perfectly good desktops at the same time.

Things the plan deliberately does not buy: a vehicle (bakkie hire at R500 to R750 a day, the donor's driver, or Alex's own car reimbursed at the SARS rate of R4.95 a kilometre), a card machine until cash sales justify R699 (EFT and Capitec Pay to start), commercial wiping software until a donor insists (ShredOS is free), a storage unit until the garage overflows, and a CompTIA course until a donor asks who certified her.

Year one without a loan

The base case shows a year-one shortfall of about R82,000 when Alex is paid R15,000 a month from day one. Bootstrapped, the salary is the variable: the board minutes a rule that she is paid, say, 40% of the month's income up to R15,000, so the company never owes money it does not have, and her pay rises as the sponsorship pipeline fills. In the base case that means little in months one to three, around R6,000 to R9,000 in months four to six as the pilot's sponsor pays and the first community sales land, and R12,000 to R15,000 from month seven. The cost of bootstrapping is that Alex keeps a part-time job or lives cheaply for six months. What it buys is a company with no creditors and no founder's loan sitting on the balance sheet when the first grant application is read.

Money that can arrive without being borrowed

• The first sponsor's deposit. Half the placement fee on signing is normal for a project and funds the parts for that batch. The pilot sponsor's R20,000 to R30,000 is the real working capital.
• A founding donation. Once Section 18A approval is through, family and friends who give cash get a receipt deductible up to 10% of their taxable income. A BackaBuddy campaign charges no platform fee since 2025-06; R20,000 from fifty people who know Alex is realistic once there is a photo of the first lab.
• Grants, from year two. The National Lotteries Commission funds charities with small grants up to R500,000 (about R1.2 billion approved in the 2024/25 round); DG Murray Trust accepts unsolicited applications in windows (the current one closes 2026-11-30, too early, so the 2027-02 window); the City of Cape Town's grants-in-aid round (R5 million, closed 2026-09-14 this year, so 2027); the MTN SA Foundation's R185 million digital-education programme and the Telkom Foundation's ICT labs. All of them want the NPO number, a year of financial statements and photographs, which is why they are year two.
• In-kind everything. Donors' furniture and bench kit as above; a school's storeroom for a month's stock; a church hall or library as the hand-over point for individuals.

SWOT

Risks and mitigations

Project plan

Sources and assumptions

• B-BBEE: Amended Codes of Good Practice, Statement 500 and Annexe 500(A) (acts.co.za); B-BBEE Commission Educational Material 9, Socio-Economic Development (2024-11) and Practice Guide 01 of 2023; Amended ICT Sector Code Statement 700; draft amendments GG 54032 Notice R.3745 (2026-01-29); dtic sworn affidavit template for specialised exempted micro enterprises; Association of B-BBEE Professionals SED webinar (2019-09); SERR Synergy on claiming Section 18A or SED, not both (2024-10-07, 2025-06-24); ISPA submission on the ICT Sector Code review (2026-05-20); BusinessDay on the B-BBEE funding-gap study (2026-10-14).
• Tax: Income Tax Act sections 8(4)(k), 10(1)(cN), 18A, 30, 54 to 64; SARS Tax Exemption Guide IT26 (issue 7, 2025-03-18) and Basic Guide IT-G16; Interpretation Note 24 (issue 5, 2023-10-31) on partial taxation; BGR 71 on receipts for property in kind (2024-05-16); SARS donations tax page (2026-08-19, R20,000 casual-gifts exemption for companies); GN 6762 of 2025 on receipt fields from 2026-03-01; IT3(d) deadlines; SARS online exempt-institution application (2026-02-27); VAT 414 guide; VAT thresholds from 2026-04-01 (R2.3 million compulsory, R120,000 voluntary).
• Company and NPO: Companies Act 71 of 2008 section 66, Schedule 1, Regulations 26 to 29; CIPC fee table and gov.za NPC page (R175 or R475; R475 budgeted); CIPC Practice Note 1 of 2024 on registered addresses; Nonprofit Organisations Act 71 of 1997 as amended by the General Laws Amendment Act 22 of 2022; DSD enforcement figures 2024/25; secondary quotes for NPC statement compilation and independent review.
• Environment and data: NEM: Waste Act; EPR Regulations GN 1184 and 1185 of 2020 and GN 400 of 2021 (refurbishment as production); GN 921 of 2013 list of waste management activities; GN R636 landfill norms (e-waste ban from 2021-08-23); eWASA FAQ and 2024 membership fees; POPIA sections 14 and 19; NIST SP 800-88 Rev. 2 (Rev. 1 withdrawn 2025-09-26); ShredOS v2025.11; Blancco and WipeDrive list prices; City of Cape Town Municipal Planning By-law 2015, Schedule 3 items 21 to 23 (home occupation).
• Market: Axiz on 2.1 million pre-Windows 11 business PCs (2025-03-28); Xperien buyback notice (late 2024); Microsoft refurbisher programme changes (2020) and InnoVent as South African MAR (2021-10); EU MAR store Citizenship licence pricing (2023); DBE School Realities (2025-02), Western Cape no-fee schools 2025 list, EFMS 2023; WCED eLearning figures (2023-11-08); Stats SA GHS 2021 and 2024; Trialogue CSI handbook 2025; Close the Gap, Computer Aid, Astute Tech Foundation, Computerlab.org.za, JUST PCs, Silulo, Computers 4 Kids and Edunova websites as read 2026-10-29; refurbished-unit prices from Supercomm, Only Laptops, PPS Africa, Radical Refurbs and Gumtree; recycler price lists from South Group and Scrap Metal Germiston (2026).
• Costs and pay: Takealot, PriceCheck, Evetech, PC International, RS, Makro prices (2026-10); Yoco pricing (2026-06); OUTsurance and Hollard on public liability; bakkie hire and storage listings in Cape Town; PayScale Cape Town salary pages (2026-05 to 2026-06), Indeed, Pnet, Careers24 advertisements; Nedbank, Capitec, Standard Bank 2026 fee guides; Bank Zero and Albaraka NPO pages.
• Author's estimates to be replaced by the pilot: yield of three usable units from four donated; 1.5 hands-on hours per unit; the parts percentages behind the R650; 55% of units to schools; R1,000 a seat sponsorship and the sponsorship rates; R1,600 average community price; R80 a drive; 12 to 15 units a week at steady state. Grants in the projections are placeholders, not promises.
• Exchange rate R18.53 per euro, ECB reference 2026-10-28. VAT 15%. All regulatory figures must be confirmed for the year of registration; this is desk research, not legal, tax or planning advice.