For 10 weeks this summer I’ve been working in Eastern Cape, generally considered to be South Africa’s poorest province. To put our work in context it is necessary to realise that of the 49.9 million people living in South Africa, nearly one third (31%) is under 15 years — that was our target audience. The estimated life expectancy is 52 years. According to the Eastern Cape AIDS Council Annual Report 2010, young people aged 21 to 30 account for about 50.3 % of all unemployed people in the country. HIV prevalence among 15 to 30 year olds accounts for approximately 32% of the national HIV prevalence. (data provided by Restless Development http://www.restlessdevelopment.org/file/nsf-southafrica-190312-pdf)

Our work in Libode town focused on running life skills and entrepreneurship workshops. At one of the underprivileged schools we were running sessions over 6 weeks, we could see an astonishing improvement in students’ confidence and self-awareness. As we run all the sessions based on non-formal education methods with our South African counterpart volunteers, at first students would trust and respect them more. Initially, we struggled with engaging them with activities we had planned like practicing public speaking or personal goal setting. However, it didn’t take more than two sessions that I would have a class of 40 students all raising their hands, wanting to voice their opinion.

All of our students proved themselves during Young Entrepreneurs Competition, ‘Dragon Den’s’ inspired event that we organised in cooperation with local schools, local charity organization and business owners. 14 teams of 4 people from my school entered the competition, which constituted about 80% of students from grades 11! The prize for winning the competition was week’s work experience at local businesses and I must admit I’ve never seen anyone fighting for an opportunity like that so hard. During the final we’ve heard end-to-end planned business ideas of opening a gym, DVD rental, internet café and a pharmacy. I was in the unfortunate position of sitting on a jury and having to make the toughest decision of picking a winner between the two strongest teams. There were tears of joy and sorrow afterwards.

Those young people know what they want and they know they can achieve it, whether it’s becoming a lawyer or opening their own business. They’ve got enough self-determination to conquer the world but without essential resources and, in the first place, without the access to information about those resources (like loans or bursaries) they just don’t know yet that they can fight poverty in their countries by themselves.

Our livelihoods programme involved much more, as career guidance, engaging with out of school youth or registering co-operatives, but I will save those stories for another time.