Soweto: from self-worth to business sense

Entrepreneurship

The University of Adelaide has recently completed a five-year project to mentor potential entrepreneurs among some of the poorest, most underprivileged residents of South Africa.

More than 400 indigenous people from Soweto and surrounding areas took part in the program monitored by the Entrepreneurship, Commercialisation & Innovation Centre under the leadership of Professor Noel Lindsay.

A South African training organisation also partnered with the University to deliver the program to long-term unemployed people from poor socio-economic backgrounds, who held either a technical qualification or diploma.

The program was funded from a $2.2 million South African Government grant specifically targeted at this group.

Professor Lindsay said of the 400 people who took part, more than 100 are now running their own business, or in the process of establishing one.

"Dozens of others have secured work. At the very least, the mentoring program has helped boost their self-esteem and improved their quality of life," he said.

"Without exception, when we started the program back in 2004, their self-esteem was in the gutter. Some of them had been unemployed for up to 20 years and their self-confidence was rock bottom.

"There is no social security in South Africa so the unemployed survive by stealing, starving or begging," he explained.

As part of the training, a team of psychologists, business consultants and mentors was employed to work with the indigenous South Africans, delivering lectures, basic marketing instruction and motivational talks.

"The very first thing we had to do was get people to believe in themselves and develop a sense of self-worth," Professor Lindsay said. "You have to remember that apartheid was not abolished in South Africa until 1991 and prior to this black people had limited access to mainstream universities. They had been denied basic human rights for a long time."

An initial "Western" approach to the training was quickly abolished and replaced with a program more suited to the indigenous culture. This included developing board games along the lines of Monopoly, which taught the fundamentals of business in an entertaining way.

The game required participants to make choices between investing money in a bank or university education, as opposed to drugs or selling arms, which incurred severe penalties.

"We even incorporated a deadly HIV/AIDS card into the game to try to educate people about the consequences of unsafe sex and injecting drug use on their health and wellbeing."

Professor Lindsay and his colleagues have been tracking the participants' progress over the past five years to measure whether the entrepreneurial program has made a significant difference to their lives.

"The program has been relatively successful in terms of people feeling more empowered and motivated to either seek work or start their own business."

Some of the success stories include two brothers who are providing catering services to 90% of Soweto's 270 bed and breakfasts; the establishment of several internet cafés and taverns; and a female lawyer who has opened her own practice.

"We are not talking millionaires here, but in relative terms the program has achieved its primary goal - to give indigenous South Africans a real sense of purpose and self-worth," Professor Lindsay said.

Two University of Adelaide PhD students also worked on this project, Anton Jordaan and Wendy Lindsay.

Story by Candy Gibson