Solar-powered billboards in Jo’burg and Cape Town have brought heat and electricity to two townships and helped to shine the spotlight on some of the issues facing the communities in which they are located.
A year after it was constructed the first solar-powered billboard in South Africa has brought a primary school in Alexandra, Johannesburg, out of obscurity and into the global limelight. The billboard made history when it won the outdoor Grand Prix Award at the 54th Cannes Advertising Award earlier this year. A second billboard has been put up in Cape Town.
Located in an informal settlement, the school caters for more than 1 400 children. Flak Ramotata, principal of the MC Weiler school in Alexandra, says the school benefited from the installation of the billboard. “The school provides the children with what is for most of them the only decent meal they will have for that day. The school also gives clothes and other material needs where it can,” she says.
The power generated by the billboard is saving the school up to R2 300 a month in electricity costs — a total cost saving of more than R30 000 since it was installed. Ramotata it has become the treasure of the community and has made the surrounding area safer by lighting up the streets near the school. “The children and members of the community have seen it featured on television and it has become a source of great pride for them,” she says.
“I feel that the billboard has brought not only light to our streets, but it has also shed light on the plight of these precious children,” says Ramotata. Many of the children are affected by or infected with HIV/Aids, some come from child- or granny-headed households, and all of them come from poor backgrounds. “It is heartbreaking to know what they go back to when they leave us but heartening to know that we are making a difference in their lives,” she says.
By all accounts its sister billboard, which is in the Cape Town-based Athlone Youth and Family Development Centre, is set to have a similar impact. The centre runs programmes for troubled teens, many of whom come from broken families or single-parent households. They have had, in most cases, a poverty-stricken upbringing.
Sidney Dicks, director of the Athlone centre, says: “The children we deal with have been robbed of the family stability and grounding necessary for them to grow into responsible adults and to fulfil their potential. Many of them are school dropouts and drug addicts. They come to the centre because someone who cares for and believes in them refers them to us.”
Recovering these youths and rebuilding their lives is often a difficult and heartbreaking journey. Counsellors and mentors at the centre work with the teenagers and their parents not only to rehabilitate the youths but also to restore broken family Ârelationships.
Says Dicks: “Having the billboard here has had a significant impact on the Athlone centre and the children. They enjoy that particular area where the billboard is located. Our electricity costs have been cut down drastically.” The billboard has enabled the centre to increase security with more floodlights installed.
Nombulelo Moholi, director of Nedbank group strategy and corporate affairs, says MC Weiler and the Athlone Youth and Family Development Centre were identified as ideal sites to place this kind of billboard.
“We try to select locations where we feel the organisation will gain from our involvement and where Nedbank will get good exposure,” she says. “We approached them with this mutual benefit in mind and they took to the idea.”