Our once-in-a-lifetime-experience is halfway!
So it has been already 2 weeks ago that we arrived in Zimbabwe…
12 Colleagues from all over the world, meeting each other for the first time, either at the airport of Frankfurt or Dubai, or in the B&B in Harare, where we are staying for the whole month.
Summarizing, it has been two great first weeks with lots of laughter, conversations, and playing games at the dinner table (we really feel like a family), and a first weekend full with trips and activities in and around Harare.
One SAP Harare family in action
On early Sunday morning September 28th I met my 2 colleagues from the Philipines and Czech Republic for the first time, while we were waiting for our flight departure from Dubai to Harare. We immediately recognized each other from the pictures on SAP’s intranet and the (video) conferences we had held in the six weeks of preparation calls, and started to chat as if we knew one another for a long time.
After we arrived in Harare in the evening, we quickly left our luggage in our rooms and went to a restaurant where we met the rest of the group, our mentor and the two representatives from Pyxera – the organization that helps SAP in setting up this social sabbatical program. It was really great to meet everyone finally for real!
On the first Sunday, Pyxera had set up a program for us, including team building games, a bus tour through the city and a lunch with music in the open air.
On the first Monday, we were invited to one of the host organizations - Impact Hub - for the opening event in which our 4 host organizations, and the 4 SAP sub teams assigned to them for the coming 4 weeks, were presented to each other.
In the afternoon, the 4 sub teams went off to their own host organizations to kick off the work adventures we had been preparing for in the past weeks…
Getting to know Young Africa and our assignment
Our sub team of Chris (US), André (Brazil) and myself (Netherlands), has been assigned to the international organization Young Africa. YA has several independently run skills centres, youth (self-) employment programmes and community activities in Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Namibia, Botswana and Zambia. Their mission is to empower young people through skills training for employability and entrepreneurship. YA offers a unique and high impact solution to youth unemployment, supported by two innovative concepts: a Franchise Method and the Integral Approach to youth development.
After a first meeting at the headquarters – which is next to the house of the founders of Young Africa Dorien Beurskens and Raj A. Joseph – we visited one of the two YA Skills Centres in Zimbabwe in Chitungwiza, on Tuesday.
What an amazing place to walk around, and to experience the well-organized set-up of the self-sustaining Centre, the motivation of the franchisees and teachers offering the many different practical, commercial and life-skills courses, and to really feel the enormous drive that all these youngsters have to educate themselves for a better future!
Back at the YA Int. HUB on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, we summarized what we saw, read and learned from the different documents and conversations we have had with their employees and came up with a (revised) Scope of Work for our Social Sabbatical assignment.
Another visit to the Skills Centre at Chitungwiza on Thursday, in which we could talk to 2 Monitoring & Evaluation officers working in the field, helped us even better understand the urgent need to move away from all the manual processes (from student registration, course/teacher evaluation to graduates follow-up) to a “Move to Digital”, which we also chose as the ‘title’ for our Scope of Work and Social Sabbatical Assignment.
More to read on our weekend activities and the work we are doing at Young Africa in my next blog!
