Jolaine Maritz, a 2025 Heronbridge College matriculant, has been named the Curro National Award winner after ranking first among students from the Top 10 IEB schools across the Curro Group. She achieved 10 distinctions and a 95% average in the Independent Examinations Board (IEB) final examinations, making her one of South Africa’s most outstanding academic performers this year.
The Curro National Award, which recognises exceptional academic achievement across all Curro schools in South Africa and Namibia, represents the pinnacle of scholastic excellence within the group’s educational network.
Maritz’s results earned her IEB Outstanding Achievement recognition, and placed her in the Top 1% nationally across six subjects, including English Home Language, Afrikaans First Additional Language, History, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Life Orientation.
Scholarship pursuit for the US biomedical pathway
Despite her exceptional results, Maritz now faces a challenge familiar to many top South African learners: securing the financial means to access tertiary education at the institution of her choice. As an international applicant, she is actively pursuing substantial scholarship and financial aid to access a pre-medical undergraduate study pathway in the United States of America, with a proposed academic focus on biomimetics and bioethics – fields that integrate biological science, medical innovation, and ethical responsibility.
The pathway represents not just academic ambition, but a strategic response to what she has witnessed firsthand in her community work.
From rural chess programmes to healthcare innovation
What sets Maritz apart is the seven-year track record of community impact that has shaped her future ambitions.
In 2018, she co-founded and led the youth development initiative Jogi Chess Evolution, delivering chess-based cognitive development programmes to children in rural children’s homes. The programme has reached thousands of learners in under-resourced communities across the country.
Through Jogi Designs, she has further contributed to the design and distribution of medical kits and essential supplies to children’s homes with limited access to healthcare resources – work that exposed her directly to systemic healthcare gaps at the community level.
This experience, she says, has directly informed both her academic interests and her determination to pursue medicine.
Delivering healthcare where it’s needed most
Maritz’s main goal now is to apply medical science in settings where access to care is limited, supporting sustainable healthcare solutions in high-need communities.
Guided by the Nguni proverb “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu” (a person is a person through other people), she views personal success as a responsibility to uplift others, with ambitions that extend beyond studying abroad to going where healthcare gaps are greatest.
