The workshop session was aimed at giving the youth a better understanding of what impactful innovation is, and how it can be applied in your current context and society.
By Mamello Maila
Cyril Ramaphosa Foundation, an independent public organization, held a youth empowerment workshop on Saturday, 7 December with 300 youth in Daveyton, Ekurhuleni. The youth empowerment workshop is one of the Foundation’s activities to commemorate its 15th anniversary this year.
Daveyton, like many country’s township, is plagued by high number of unemployed youth, leaving many of them despondent about solutions to their daily challenges. The workshops aims to capacitating the young adults with entrepreneurial skills.
Moreover the workshop expose youth to different ways of looking at their problems and to seek solutions to them. The participants were given very useful tools to use in their entrepreneurial journeys and everyday lives.
The delegates attended both theory and practical sessions that that stimulated self-reflection, purpose-driven thinking, problem solving and pitching. The sessions were facilitated by Setup Academy with the keynote address delivered by Sizwe Mahlangu, Marketing Executive at Halfway Toyota Group.
“Empowerment workshops like these are no longer a luxury, they are an important tool to keep our youth focused on finding solutions that will uplift them and their communities. Whilst we understand that not everyone is going to start a business after this workshop, we are pleased that they will be equipped with solutions-based thinking and have renewed way of tackling challenges,” said Mmabatho Maboya, CEO of Cyril Ramaphosa Foundation.
“I enjoyed Sizwe Mahlangu’s talk a lot, he shared practical methods that we could us in our everyday lives to address our daily challenges. Most importantly, he reminds us not to be too hard on ourselves if we fail, saying that resilience and getting back on track is what counts,” Tshepo, a workshop participant, said.
For the Foundation, education and enterprise development are the most direct means to improving the quality of life of South Africa’s people and promoting the Foundation’s programmes are implemented through its partner entities.
Black Umbrella, was amongst the guest speakers who shared one or two things about how one can be innovative “thinking outside the box” by developing small businesses through a nationwide incubation programme. Its NextGen Academy is part of a diversified resourcing strategy that aims to deliver self-staining reinvestments into Black Umbrella. We accompanied by KST, a collaboration between Cyril Ramaphosa Foundation and Kagiso Trust thata leverages the best practices of each organisation’s Whole School Development programmes at a district level in the Free State.
The Cyril Ramaphosa Foundation Youth Empowerment’s mission is to develop career entrepreneurs. They aspire to provide accredited skills training in New Venture Creation taught by entrepreneurs, using experiential training approaches.
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