Angelina Zenani is a godsend for the people of New Crossroads outside Cape Town, where she runs community projects aimed at improving the standard of living in a burgeoning township plagued by unemployment and abject poverty.
Scores of residents busy themselves with leatherwork, sewing classes and tending a vegetable garden, secure in the knowledge that their children are well taken care of in Zenani’s after-school care centre. A soup kitchen feeds hundreds of the township’s destitute every day.
The initiatives are part of Zenani’s Masizakhe Development Project and enjoy the support of Old Mutual’s Rural Economic Development Initiative (Redi), which was established in 1999 to alleviate critical social conditions in poor communities.
“My only concern is to help people. There is a need to train people so that they can make something of their lives,” says Zenani.
Masizakhe is one of Redi’s flagship projects, a role that earned Zenani the title of champion of community empowerment. The initiative disburses more than R20-million a year through its programmes.
Liyanda Maseko, a project manager at the Old Mutual Foundation, says Redi is a rural network and is being implemented in 20 communities and six provinces. The foundation has committed R27,6-million for the initiative from 2001 to 2003.
The initiative has established 122 new businesses in different parts of the country. Women own 65% of these businesses and more than 300 jobs have been created.
In the past year 4 057 people have attended development workshops to learn about communication, raising funds and running a business.
Roddy Sparks, MD of Old Mutual South Africa, says his company’s vision is to “make a real difference to South Africa and the advancement of its people through social investment programmes.
“With this kind of help, women like Zenani are making [a difference] in their communities … She turned an empty piece of land from her local church into a food gardening project and now grows spinach, potatoes, cabbage, green peppers, lettuce, tomatoes, beetroot and onions. She sells the vegetables and uses them for her soup kitchen,” Sparks says.
Redi has provided shipping containers for Zenani’s project to house the childcare and creche facilities, a Wendy house and playground equipment.
“Graduates of the leatherworks and sewing classes, including physically challenged students, have gone on to start their own businesses,” says Sparks.
Maseko says Redi provides loans to community projects to help make them sustainable. She says this method of community empowerment is bearing fruit and many of the projects are already starting to pay back loans. “The decision to give loans rather than grants was made by the women themselves.”
Three-quarters of the funding goes to loans and the rest is spent on grants.
Other projects include a primary schools mathematics development programme and a primary schools regeneration programme.
The regeneration programme improves conditions at primary schools by fixing broken doors, leaking roofs, fencing, toilets and classrooms. The foundation offers a grant of R10 000 to each primary school, which has to raise matching funds to qualify.
A handbook entitled How to Raise Funds for Your School is supplied to every school in the project. So far 206 of the schools have raised more than R1,1-million.
At one school in Limpopo province “the headmaster taught the grade six and seven learners about plumbing. Now when something needs to be fixed around the school, they do it themselves. This saves the school R3500 a year,” Maseko said.
The primary schools mathematics development programme has contracted the Maths Centre and Rhodes University Maths Education Programme to implement a teacher-development programme. It also provides support material to 245 schools.