I didn’t come to Trevor Noah through late night TV or his comedy spots. I first became a fan after reading his 2016 memoir, “Born a Crime,” which recounts his experience growing up mixed-race during the final years of apartheid in South Africa. Both of my parents made it a point to connect the civil rights struggles of the 1960s to what was happening in South Africa as I came of age in the 1990s. On a family trip there just before 9/11, we were treated well as Americans, but I still remember overhearing our host refer to an elderly Black South African cleaner as “boy” when he thought no one was listening — a moment that stayed with me.
When Noah succeeded Jon Stewart as host of “The Daily Show,” he began earning the big bucks, but he also faced high expectations. With his blend of sharp social satire and a global perspective on race and injustice, he quickly found his voice. That same distinct lens now shapes his philanthropy, which focuses on his home country.
Launching the Trevor Noah Foundation (TNF) in 2018 to serve his home city of Johannesburg and South Africa more broadly, Noah focuses on improving access to quality education for young people in historically disadvantaged African communities. The need is still dire, especially so when it comes to youth. As one example, the youth unemployment rate in Gauteng, the most populated province in South Africa, was nearly 43% for young people aged 25 to 34 years. TNF Managing Director Shalane Yuen noted that the national youth unemployment rate is even more alarming, at around 46% for people under 35 — and a full 62% for job-seekers under 25.
I recently caught up with Noah over Zoom, where I found out more about his philanthropic perspective seven years after starting his foundation, the deeply personal forces that inspired him to focus on education, TNF’s new ideas — including a new seven-figure innovation fund — and where he sees his philanthropy heading next.
Mzansi: Trevor Noah’s early experiences with giving
In the Bantu language of Xhosa, spoken by over 7 million South Africans, “Mzansi” means “south” or “down south” — a term of endearment for the country. Noah was born to a Swiss-German father and a Xhosa mother and raised in Soweto, a Black township in Johannesburg, during the 1980s — the last full decade of apartheid. Though he was still a child, the experience of growing up under a system of legalized segregation left a lasting impression. In “Born a Crime,” Noah recalled how his mother had to pretend to be a maid or nanny just to walk beside him in public. Rooted in her deep faith, his mother’s resourcefulness shaped Noah’s early view of the world and also fostered his early understanding of philanthropy.
“My first exposure to it was the church. And I think oftentimes, people don’t think of churches as philanthropies, but in many ways, a well-run church is,” Noah said. “I would see people getting food if they didn’t have, I would see people getting clothes if they didn’t have. It was a network that connected people who had with those who didn’t.”
Noah recalled that one of the churches he attended as a child offered free bus transportation for congregants traveling from a constellation of underresourced townships. Once there, attendees had access to food and other essential services. He also noted that he was able to attend a private school thanks to a scholarship provided by his mother’s employer — a gesture he considers a meaningful form of philanthropy. And at his grandmother’s funeral, most people talked about how she would provide her home as a safe haven for women whose husbands were abusing them, sometimes giving them a place for as long as a year to get them back on their feet.
“Growing up in an African family, I don’t think any of us are very removed from philanthropy in some way, shape, or form,” he said. “My mom always used to say it best, ‘One of the best ways to know that you have is by giving.’ It really shows you that you have.”
How Noah aims to support education as a “holistic container”
When Noah arrived stateside and his career started taking off, he found charities to support through individual donations, including the Nelson Mandela Foundation, as well as local schools and hospitals.
As he looked to formalize his giving, Noah sought to understand how effective philanthropy worked and where a “donated dollar” fell apart. “I was always most impressed and most inspired by philanthropies where, if somebody gave a dollar, almost 90 cents of that dollar would be going to the actual people it was trying to help,” he said.
That learning journey eventually led him back to his roots in South Africa and to a focus on the education that grounded him and led him on a path to success. But Noah was quick to draw a distinction between learning and education. “I think of education as a holistic container… I think about the space that a person is in when they’re learning,” Noah said. That space, he noted, includes not just the student, but also teachers, parents and the broader community.
In this way, Noah’s vision echoes that of other philanthropists like Stephen and Ayesha Curry, whose Eat. Learn. Play. Foundation emphasizes transforming schools into true community hubs — places where resources, support and opportunity reverberate outward and uplift entire neighborhoods. “I have yet to find a place where the education system is fantastic and doing well, and the community isn’t,” Noah added.
Noah has personally contributed $1.5 million to the foundation since its launch. To clarify, the Trevor Noah Foundation is headquartered in Johannesburg, South Africa, where it is registered as a public benefit organization — the equivalent of a tax-exempt nonprofit. From 2018 to 2022, TNF South Africa received grant funding from TNF US, a separate and independently registered private charity based in the United States. Since 2023, TNF South Africa has been fiscally sponsored in the United States by the Entertainment Industry Foundation. This partnership enables U.S.-based supporters to make tax-deductible contributions toward its work in South Africa. TNF has also raked in a range of corporate and nonprofit partners including Microsoft, Oak Foundation, PKF Octagon and the Elevate Prize Foundation.
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TNF’s founding managing director, Shalane Yuen, is an NYU Wagner grad who first met Noah when she was working in South Africa as a USAID adviser and got involved in the South African comedy circuit through her comedian-entertainer husband. “In that comedy world, I was kind of like the nonprofit girl… and so I was introduced to Trevor as someone who was interested in setting up a nonprofit,” Yuen said.
Noah made his passion for education clear from the outset and wanted to help bring innovative ideas to the fore, Yuen said. The foundation came out of the gates partnering with one school in South Africa. Via its Khulani Schools Program, the Trevor Noah Foundation now works with a network of about 19 schools in the greater Johannesburg area, reaching about 13,000 to 15,000 young people annually through 600 educators.
“Khulani” means “grow” in Xhosa, and the foundation’s flagship program is rooted in that ethos, focusing on teacher training, career guidance and digital skills development. “We run programs ranging from AI and robotics labs to psychosocial support for educators to infrastructure,” said Yuen.
In one standout example, the foundation provided certified construction training to young people, who were then deployed to Khulani’s primary school partners, where they helped refurbish school facilities. When I spoke with Yuen, those young builders were just about to see the full fruits of their labor — a brand-new community hall — unveiled in a ceremony.
Another Trevor Noah Foundation program is entwined with USAID, which was another long-running TNF partner. Alongside YALI-RCLSA (Young African Leaders Initiative) and the University of South Africa, young leaders were provided with leadership development training in the education sector across Southern and Eastern Africa. The partnership has so far produced over 240 alumni across 30 countries, with a notable 40% of participants hailing from rural areas.
While the program is currently on pause amid larger uncertainties around the future of global aid funding following USAID’s dismantling, Yuen said TNF continues to support its alumni network. “That program is on pause, which is a nice way to say that it will not come back in its prior shape or form,” Yuen said.
On a happier note, even amid the hollowing-out of government aid commitments, TNF has debuted a new offering. In April 2025, Noah took the stage at the Skoll World Forum in Oxford for a conversation with Don Gips, CEO of the Skoll Foundation. It was there that Noah announced the launch of the Khulani Nathi Innovation Fund — a R30 million ($1.75 million) venture philanthropy initiative designed to support South African education nonprofits focused on teacher development and pathways for youth opportunity.
“Khulani Nathi,” which means “We Grow Together” in Xhosa, captures the ethos of collective effort and shared progress that TNF wants to bring to bear.
Since 2018, TNF’s role has centered on funding, codesigning, and co-initiating education initiatives, largely in partnership with local South African organizations with technical expertise, Yuen said. The Khulani Nathi Innovation Fund marks the foundation’s turn to trust-based grantmaking, providing flexible funding to education nonprofits with innovative solutions. This is especially significant considering most education nonprofits in South Africa rely heavily on restricted corporate funding.
Yuen is looking ahead to two major national challenges on the horizon that the fund can help ameliorate. One is the looming educator shortage — by 2040, nearly half of South Africa’s teachers are expected to retire. The other is the country’s staggering youth unemployment rate.
Embracing a trust-based ethos and looking ahead
Reflecting on his seven years at the foundation, Noah said one of the biggest lessons has been letting go of preconceived ideas about how to create change. Like a growing number of philanthropists who emphasize shifting power to grantees and community leaders, he said a key evolution in his approach has been learning to listen more closely and to trust that the people experiencing the problems are best positioned to solve them.
He’s quick to resist broad generalizations about what works in philanthropy, too, even as he moves between South Africa and the U.S. “I’ve met and worked with organizations in America that are high-touch and high efficacy. But I’ve also seen organizations that are like vanity projects, for lack of a better term,” he said.
That said, in South Africa, Noah said he’s witnessed how organizations often achieve remarkable impact with far fewer resources. He’s seen South African groups “move mountains with just a shovel,” finding creative ways to do more with less.
“You meet a grandmother anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa and you see how she moves a dollar around,” Noah said. “You see how small communities of these women have figured out flows of money that even some of the biggest banks in the world haven’t gotten success from.” He believes this kind of resourcefulness and creativity should inspire greater humility from wealthier countries and philanthropic institutions working in the Global South.
Yuen describes South Africa today as a nation of stark contrasts. It has the highest Gini coefficient in the world, reflecting extreme income inequality. At the same time, the country became the first in the world to incorporate robotics and coding into its national curriculum. But translating that into meaningful change for students is a different story when many individual schools still lack basics like water or electricity.
Looking ahead, Noah is continuing to focus on the bigger picture. With funding support from organizations like Geneva-based Oak Foundation, which gave a R13.5-million grant to the Trevor Noah Foundation in 2022, he’s on the hunt for even more ideas that can scale rapidly. “There are worlds where interesting entrepreneurs can come up with ideas that aren’t a zero-sum game, that aren’t just extracting wealth,” Noah said. “So that’s what we’re looking at now. We’re looking at smart innovators, interesting innovators… and just saying to them, ‘Hey, let’s make this thing happen.’”
