SA game makers are levelling up financial literacy and entrepreneurship education

The next frontier in financial literacy may not be another classroom worksheet, corporate social investment roadshow or fancy laminated budgeting pamphlet that gathers dust in a school office.

It may be a game.

That is not as frivolous as it sounds. In a country where too many young people leave school knowing more about trigonometry than compound interest, and where entrepreneurship is often sold as an escape hatch without enough practical support, gaming is starting to look less like entertainment and more like infrastructure.

Cape Town-based impact games studio Sea Monster has been appointed by The King’s Trust International to build a large-scale entrepreneurship game for young people across several Commonwealth countries – Jordan, Pakistan, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya – taking a South African game-based learning model onto the global stage. The project launch in Nigeria has been pushed back to the next phase.

At the same time, local entrepreneurs Danei Rall and Elijah Djan are seeing strong interest in FinMaster, their financial literacy board game that began life as a handmade pizza-box prototype and has since moved towards mainstream retail distribution, including Exclusive Books.

These two stories show that financial education is no longer about just trying to tell young people how money works, but is taking on a new look as SA’s growing games industry starts to fulfil financial literacy needs.

Games get serious

Sea Monster CEO Glenn Gillis says The King’s Trust work is about entrepreneurship rather than narrow financial literacy, but the line between the two is thin. Young people will have to make decisions about stock, cash flow, pricing, reputation, debt and longer-term investment, the same messy bundle that sits inside any real-world small business.

“The benefit that comes from game-based learning is that it reverses the usual education model. Instead of knowing something and then applying it, players do something and then understand the principle behind it,” Gillis said.

That sounds simple, but it is precisely the part traditional teaching often battles to replicate. A child or even a young adult can easily memorise the definition of cash flow. It is another thing entirely to feel the panic of making a pricing decision, running short of cash, and realising too late that reputation, stock and customers are all part of one living system.

Gillis says entrepreneurship is difficult to teach in isolation because so many decisions happen at once. In a game, he says, “I’ve got to manage my reputation at the same time, because I’ve got to manage my cash flow,” while also making short-term trading decisions and long-term investment calls. “It’s almost impossible to teach those things in any other format, because it’s just not going to be real. It’s not going to feel like your decisions matter.”

Lived realities

“We couldn’t be more delighted with our collaboration with Sea Monster. From the outset, they invested the time to truly understand not only the goals of the project and the ambition of the charity, but crucially the lived realities of the young people this game is designed to empower. They brought creativity, pace and real energy to the process, and we’re excited to see the transformational impact the game will have when it goes live,” says Jo Parsons, director of delivery and impact at the Kings Trust International.

The King’s Trust project builds on Sea Monster’s existing work with partners including Allan Gray Orbis Foundation, Nedbank and Lemonade Day USA. The Allan Gray Entrepreneurship Challenge has reportedly reached more than 10,800 players across four countries, with a 74.4% completion rate and a 448% improvement in business valuation knowledge. The Nedbank Chow Town experience on Roblox attracted 1.5 million young South Africans and earned an 81% positive rating.

Failure feels useful

One of the most powerful arguments for gaming in entrepreneurship education is that it allows young people to fail without detonating their real lives.

For a young entrepreneur in a low-income household, a failed business may mean debt, family pressure, lost savings or years of recovery, whereas in a game, failure can be useful data.

Gillis says one successful player in the Allan Gray Entrepreneurship Challenge told him he had run several different strategies, including using AI to suggest ways of playing, before adapting his approach.

“I didn’t fail 99 times, I ran 99 experiments till I found a strategy that worked,” he told Gillis. For Gillis, that is the point: entrepreneurship requires “systematic failure”, knowing when to pivot and when to keep pushing.

“Failing a lot in the game is a type of success,” he says, because it allows players to experiment quickly and cheaply. The deeper learning is often not just about pricing or profit, but resilience, critical thinking and communication, the “underneath the waterline” skills that games can track through player behaviour.

Sea Monster’s pitch is also distinctly African. Gillis argues that entrepreneurship education cannot simply be imported from Western models and reskinned with local characters. It needs to work on low-end smartphones, in data-constrained environments, with shared devices, cultural nuance, local business references and the possibility that the power may go off halfway through a lesson.

Gillis says South African developers are used to designing around constraint.

“We go in asking a lot of questions, not arriving necessarily with a predetermined way that things are going to work,” he says. That, he points out, can be a strategic advantage: design for the most constrained user and the product becomes stronger everywhere.

Pizza box origins

FinMaster’s origin story is much smaller, but no less telling.

Rall and Djan, both industrial engineering graduates, began with the idea of an app. But when they needed something physical to demonstrate their idea at a school market day, they improvised. The first prototype was a pizza box with a laminated A4 page for a board, printed fake money and tokens made by breaking apart an abacus.

“That’s literally what it was,” Rall recalls. They made 10 and sold four at the first market day.

That tiny signal grew into a longer discovery process. Rall says they interviewed about 60 parents and found that roughly 80% wanted to teach their children about money but did not feel equipped, confident, knowledgeable, or simply did not have the time.

The comment that stuck with her was from a parent who said he hoped his daughter would “marry a rich husband”. Rall’s own motivation is personal: her mother went through two divorces and, she says, stayed longer than she might have because of money. The lesson was blunt: financial literacy is not just about bank accounts, it is about agency.

FinMaster now teaches players not just about earning, spending, saving and sharing, but also asset classes, event shocks and portfolio choices. Event cards can include anything from Covid-19 to artificial intelligence, tariffs or geopolitical conflict, showing players how the outside world affects money.

“The idea is that it’s not a lesson,” Rall says. “You’re playing the game.” A facilitator can pause to explain a concept, but the game is designed so players can learn by doing.

The mechanics are deceptively simple. Players build net worth through cash and assets. They can buy savings products, stocks, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), tax-free savings accounts, property, retirement assets, business assets and alternative investments. The event cards can reward or punish those choices, nudging players towards diversification without turning the board into a punishment machine.

Learning takes play

What links Sea Monster and FinMaster is not format. One is building digital experiences at scale; the other has a physical board game at its centre. The common thread is that both treat financial decision-making as behaviour rather than information.

This is important because SA does not have a shortage of financial literacy pamphlets, campaigns and worthy PDFs. What we do have is a shortage of learning tools that people actually want to use long enough for their behaviour to shift.

Gillis is blunt about the opportunity. He says games are not “pure entertainment” in this context, but impact tools that can be tracked over time to understand whether players later start businesses, earn income or pursue further training. His long-term wish is for common methodologies that allow institutions to track entrepreneurial development across years, while protecting user privacy.

He even imagines a future where a bank might look at a young entrepreneur’s game profile, not only their conventional credit score, and see evidence of communication, critical thinking and decision-making.

“I’m going to lend to you not based on any credit score, which is exclusionary,” he says, but based on a richer understanding of the person and their likelihood of success.

That future is still a few levels away. There are obvious questions about privacy, data protection, children, profiling and whether game behaviour should ever influence access to finance. Sea Monster says these issues are central to its design process, particularly when young people gather in digital spaces. Gillis compares it to dropping a child at a shopping centre: the environment may be useful, but the responsibility is enormous.

Still, the broader point holds. If SA wants more entrepreneurs, better money habits and young people who can navigate an economy full of shocks, then financial education has to become more practical, more engaging and more rooted in reality.

A pizza box and a global impact game may seem worlds apart. But both are pointing in the same direction: money lessons may finally be learning to play. DM