Peer pressure has been the cause of many young – and not so young – people going sadly astray. For Elethu Rotsho, a 15-year old, Grade 10 student at the Centre of Science and Technology (COSAT), a secondary school in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, peer pressure has led him down a much more positive path. He is one of 12 students who are collectively known as the Optimistic Youth Reporters, which he joined “because my friends forced me to join”.
In October last year, the Optimistic Youth Reporters had the first broadcast of what is the first public high school radio station on the African continent. The COSAT radio project was established by the Children’s Radio Foundation (CRF), which is involved in projects across six African countries (Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, Zambia and South Africa) designed to provide platforms for young people to express themselves using radio.
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The relationship with COSAT was, as explained by Project Manager, Linda Daniels, “initiated by a journalist who spent some time doing a story on the school for international media. He had been working with a group of Grade 7 kids and felt that, considering our work with young people, it was a good fit.”
Despite joining because of his friends, for Rotsho, “as time has passed, I really got into it. I really want to contribute to getting teenage voices around the country heard. While I grew up in a comfortable home in Khayelitsha, the environment in the township has a lot of negative influences, like smoking and crime. I don’t think that mainstream media are doing enough in talking about the issues that affect us a young people.”
Ongeziwe Mgidi, also a 15-year old Grade 10 student, agrees.
“Most of the media focuses on older people while it is us young people who are facing the biggest challenges. If they could put more attention on the young, including highlighting young people reaching higher levels of society at a younger age, it would help,” she says.
Mgidi signed up because she has always been interested in a career in journalism. While she initially thought becoming an Optimistic Young Reporter would involve writing articles, it has given her insight into a different aspect of journalism as well as running a radio show.
“We broadcast once every two weeks to a live audience but meet every Friday for training and to prepare for each show. We divide ourselves into the different positions, i.e. producer, researcher, presenter, etc. for that specific show. My favorite role is producer. I’m good at keeping time and I like people to do what I say,” says Mgidi.
“We look at the challenges that we, as youth, the township and the whole country, face and put together the show topics from that. We go out and interview our school mates and people from the community, which we include in the show. The presenters then discuss it on air before opening up for comments from the audience,” says Rotsho.
The show is broadcast from a radio desk that has been built in a hall at the school. CRF’s role has been to facilitate the weekly sessions, which started over two years ago, providing the young reporters with a solid foundation in radio reporting skills, media ethics and child rights. They will be leaving the school and the young reporters to maintain and run their station independently in the next few months.
“This has been very much a two-way process; a horizontal exchange between myself, other CRF colleagues and the young people. What’s exciting is we can see a lot of the topics push beyond the school gates into community. We have had parents and teachers engaging. It’s been an incredible learning experience. I’ve been struck by the vibrancy and energy of these young people, who we can learn from. As adults, we tend to think we know better in terms of guiding and teaching. They have much to teach the world,” says Daniels.
And the young reporters have gained immensely from being part of the project, both in terms of their own personal development as well as in contributing to the solving of some of the issues they face.
Mgidi says she has become much more confident and comfortable with asking questions and sharing her opinions, although a journalism career no longer seems to be in her future.
“I talked to my parents about journalism but they feel it isn’t a stable career. The more you are published, the more you get paid but it isn’t guaranteed. I’m now thinking of forensics because I like finding out things.”
For Rotsho, who raps and is passionate about music, the future is not as clear. At this stage, his focus is on doing what he can as part of the Optimistic Young Reporters.
“It is important to communicate directly with the residents of the township. We need to try find solutions from them because (we) are the ones living with the challenges. Radio helps with this and we normally get positive feedback. It has also taught me how to think better as well as differentiate between positive and negative things,” he says.
What COSAT’s radio project demonstrates is that the future of Africa are truly engaged in their lives and the world around them. They are playing their part to ensure that the past and present create a very different future.

Taking Back THE Airwaves

It all started with R40 ($4) and a neighbor’s oven. A year later, Espinaca Innovations is a bakery on a mission to make money by getting people in Khayelitsha in the Western Cape province to eat bread packed with spinach.
Espinaca, meaning spinach in Spanish, is where Nomjana bakes about 40 loaves and umpteen muffins every day. But the idea didn’t come by easily.
Nomjana started off selling clothes in his community of Khayelitsha, just outside Cape Town, to make a living. But he knew he needed something of his own, something innovative.
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A year before attending the Raymond Ackerman Academy, Nomjana decided to change his lifestyle and became a vegetarian. As he read a newspaper article about diabetic patients standing in long queues at hospitals, it spurred the spinach bread idea. It could be the answer for many people.
“I knew spinach was something that is a solution to my society due to the fact that it grows [all year], it’s versatile and it’s nutritious. I did my research, and found it was the most nutritious vegetable in the world,” adds Nomjana.
While attending the Academy, in partnership with the University of Cape Town, Nomjana was able to improve his entrepreneurial skills. The Academy is a post-matric level institution offering studies in entrepreneurial development.
Espinaca Innovations was a great idea on paper but implementing it proved to be a challenge. The only problem was that nobody was interested at the time.
“Eventually I just sat down and said let me use what I have and during that time I had nothing but the intellectual capital and $4 in my pocket. And I didn’t have an oven. I was living in a shack (a tin roof house) in a backyard with my wife. We were just dating at the time,” Nomjana says.
But he knew that he couldn’t operate this kind of business from a shack. So he asked a neighbor if he could bake bread in her oven when she was not using it.
In February last year, with his neighbor’s oven and R40 ($4), Nomjana sold about 200 loaves in 25 days. He grows the spinach in his backyard in about 20 crates and enriches the bread with it.
All good so far but Nomjana soon realized that he was not making enough money with the borrowed oven so he approached Pick ’n Pay (a grocery store owned by millionaire Raymond Ackerman) for assistance.
“That’s when they assisted with a four burner oven of my own I could use on a daily basis and at night as well. I spent my time baking lots of breads and going to the field and selling to people on the street, which I’m still doing now. Like going to train stations and selling door-to-door,” says Nomjana.
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The grocery store placed Espinaca Innovations into their small business incubation until it was big enough to become a supplier.
He now supplies the Pick ’n Pay head office canteen.
With the grocery store’s assitance Nomjana was able to bake more loaves but distribution became an issue as he was producing more bread than he could sell.
The solution was delivering bread on bicycles. He partnered with a crowd funding platform which helped to raise around R11,200 ($1,000) in two months. It enabled Nomjana to buy five bicycles to deliver bread.
Today, Nomjana has a wider range of spinach products, ranging from spinach muffins, sandwiches using the spinach bread, juices and smoothies.
These spinach products are sold and delivered to orphanages, pre-schools, and homes in Khayelitsha. He also supplies Spar, a grocery store chain, in Khayelitsha.
Nomjana will soon establish his own premises where he would be able to sell all his spinach products. He hopes to be able to turn the idea into a franchise across townships in the Western Cape.
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On The Crust Of Something Big

The idea came on an errand. The grandparents of Sizwe Nzima asked him to walk to the clinic to collect chronic medication for them. It was not far from their home in Khayelitsha, 35km outside Cape Town in South Africa. The trip changed his life.
The errand was a symptom to the problem that faces many public hospitals and clinics in South Africa. They are choked by long queues.
Nzima thought to himself, on that day, how a team on bicycles could deliver medication faster and more efficiently.
The World Health Organization says that of the 36 million people in the world, who died from chronic disease in 2008, nine million were younger than 60. Ninety percent of them were premature deaths that occurred in low- and middle-income countries, such as South Africa.
“We did some research at the clinic. We asked the Khayelitsha Health District to find out what people think of the introduction of the new service,” says Nzima.
This was the birth of Iyeza Express, a medicine delivery business that opened in Khayelitsha last year. Nzima completed a six-month entrepreneurship course at the Raymond Ackerman Academy of Entrepreneurial Development. Ackerman is the founder of South Africa’s second largest supermarket, Pick ‘n Pay, and is on the FORBES list of the continent’s 40 richest people.
Nzima was rejected the first time he applied to the academy in 2011, but he kept applying and was accepted in 2012 and won R10,000 ($1,000) for the best entrepreneur.
“I bought those two bicycles I started off with and bought a few t-shirts. I bought a phone, printed a few business cards and a few pamphlets. I saved the rest of the money for transport and for traveling and started using it for repairs,” says Nzima.
“I combined the experience I had in having to wait in those long queues, waking up early in the morning and going through that whole process at the hospital and leaving late.”
Nzima delivered medication to doorsteps for clients, who were too busy to collect them or too weary to stand. He charged them R10 ($1) for the service.
In one year, he has grown his customer base from his grandparents to more than 200 clients. He has four people pedaling with him thanks to seed capital from the South African Breweries Innovation Awards.
“I won a R100,000 grant that helped me buy more bicycles, buy more uniforms, buy bags and build my apartment, where I can live here and keep my bikes,” says Nzima.
For now the headquarters are a little corrugated iron shack in his grandparents’ backyard, where he keeps the bicycles safely and does the books.
He is buying more bicycles and needs people to pedal them. Nzima hopes to gain a subsidy from the health department after reading the objectives in the government’s 2020 health plan booklet. For now, every day Nzima and his four-man team flits through Khayelitsha’s alleys and roads with a backpack filled with goods that will ease the pain and may save the lives of their customers.
Right now, they are far from making a fortune from their daily runs but their name Iyeza means it’s coming.

The Pedal Power That Could Save Lives On The Road To Riches

Quitting your job to embark on a new business venture is always a risk. But leaving stable employment when living in Khayelitsha, South Africa’s third largest township where half the population is out of work, almost borders on insanity… or genius.
Wongama Baleni (23), Vuyile Msaku (25) and Vusumzi Mamile (24) have done exactly that. The childhood friends opened Khayelitsha’s first real coffee shop in July that sells cappuccinos, espressos and americanos brewed from top quality coffee beans.
“It was our dream to own our own business. We convinced each other that it was time to try something new,” says Msaku, who used to work as a barrista at a well-known South African coffee shop chain and brought the professional know-how to the venture.
Something new they did indeed. In a place where stores are usually housed in metal containers or rickety wooden stalls, the Department of Coffee (DOC)—a professionally branded shop with a modern logo and corporate colors—is the real deal.
“We are the first and only ones to sell quality coffee and cappuccinos in the township. The only other coffee you get here is instant,” says Msaku full of pride.
As a trained barrista it was Msaku’s job to source fresh beans for their store. He got a supplier to prepare a special blend of Arabica, Ethiopian and Italian beans that will be sold solely to the DOC.
“It’s a mild, medium roast, not too bitter. I created it with the people of Khayelitsha in mind,” he says, explaining that his average customer comes from an instant coffee culture and isn’t used to Italian-style strong, thick coffee.
At $0.80 for a regular americano, $1 for a cappuccino and $0.90 for a double espresso, the DOC is an affordable place to get one’s caffeine fix. The shop also sells muffins at $0.30 a piece and cookies for a mere $0.25. In summer, iced latte and cool drinks will be added to the menu but the food offering will remain limited.
“We don’t want to go too broad. We rather focus on our brand, on coffee. At most, we might sell sandwiches and coffee in a combo.”
Baleni, Msaku and Mamile have given careful thought to the branding of their store. The primary color is a warm, bright orange “to attract customers”, says Baleni, combined with either white or black. The uncluttered logo is made up of two stylized coffee beans, diagonally placed so that they form a heart shape, symbolizing love for coffee. The three owners wear stylish black shirts with the orange DOC logo stitched onto their back under orange aprons with the same logo printed in black. Trendy straw hats round off the look. The message: drinking good coffee is hip and cool.
Six weeks after opening its doors, the trio already sells more than 200 cups of coffee a day. With 30 to 55 cents profit per cup, that’s about $2,500 in earnings a month—not bad for a small start-up in a township setting. A key to their early success has been the choice of location. Positioned opposite the Harare train station, one of Khayelitsha’s main commuter hubs, and close to the local magistrates court, hospital, shopping mall and taxi rank, the DOC benefits from the bustling foot traffic of hundreds of residents each day. To make sure they won’t miss early risers, the DOC opens its doors at 4am, seven days a week, closing only at 6pm, when the after-work rush is over.
Apart from take-away sales, numerous people who work in the area call in for deliveries.
“In the beginning, we were worried that the township people wouldn’t understand [coffee culture], but they surprised us. There’s a new generation in Khayelitsha that is keen to change the perception of the township, lift the standard,” Says Msaku.
For this young crowd, drinking cappuccinos is fashionable, a small status symbol that shows “I’m moving up”. It’s something worth spending a dollar on, at least once a day.
The DOC’s business premise is spot on. According to a report by the African Development Bank (AfDB) last year, the continent&#8217;s middle class tripled in the past three decades. Now, a third of all Africans, or 313 million people, belong to this group. Although the data has to be treated with caution—the AfDB’s definition of lower middle class includes anyone earning $4 to $10 a day, while those earning $10 to $20 a day count as upper middle class—one thing is certain: Africa’s growing middle class has brought a new kind of consumerism to the continent as more and more people can afford to buy things beyond their most basic needs. Cappuccinos are just one example.
It was a difficult road to travel until the trio’s dream of opening a coffee shop became reality. In early 2011, Msaku, Baleni, a fireman, and Mamile, a worker in a towel factory, quit their jobs to pursue a “Micro-MBA” at business school—The Business Place eKapa, which specializes in small to medium-sized enterprise development. They studied store management, costing, pricing, stock control, marketing and accounting, and after several months of intense market research identified a gap in the market: the cappuccino in the township.
“We took a huge risk leaving our jobs. [Financially], it was a very difficult period for us until the opening,” says Mamile.
The three men lived off their meager savings and relied on support from their families until they hurdled the problem of finance. In the beginning, it didn’t look promising. Several banks had turned down their applications for a loan, as neither had enough financial security to qualify for credit. But then a chance encounter helped getting their venture under way. A group of private entrepreneurs from Cape Town, who were looking for an opportunity to “pay it back” and liked the trio’s coffee shop idea, offered them an interest-free loan, repayable within three years.
“They liked our concept and decided to mentor us,” says Baleni.
How much venture capital they invested to get the shop up and running, the three young owners are reluctant to disclose, however.
“We don’t want to attract too much attention,” says Baleni, fearing envy from the community that might lead to theft. In Khayelitsha, where high unemployment rates have caused massive poverty, drug abuse and crime, safety remains a prime concern. The set-up of the coffee shop reflects this, too. The windows are protected by thick burglar bars. Intruders are kept at bay by a heavy security gate and a wooden door, which is locked at all times. Earnings need to be banked at least once a day to lower the risk of a hold-up. The short walk to the bank is never done alone.
But that’s the reality of South African township life, Mamile says, something every entrepreneur who wants to do business here has to reckon with.
“We’ll do whatever it takes to make this work,” he promises, because the trio’s business plans don’t end here. Once they have paid off their loan—the three count on a return on investment within the next two years already—Msaku, Baleni and Mamile want to turn the Department of Coffee into a chain.
“We plan to open more stores in Khayelitsha and in other townships,” says Baleni.
With that, he does not only think about their own success but has a bigger picture in mind: economic growth and upliftment within previously disadvantaged urban communities.
“At the moment, all money is flowing out of Khayelitsha. Everyone spends their hard-earned cash in the city. The wealth doesn’t stay here,” he says.
The DOC might be one step towards changing this.  <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-1374" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/DOC_8_KPalitza-300x197.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="197" />

Tag: Khayelitsha

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

Taking Back THE Airwaves

On The Crust Of Something Big

The Pedal Power That Could Save Lives On The Road To Riches

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