The Oribi #GirlsinBusiness programme is a three-month social innovation programme aimed at awareness and social building skills for young girls in marginalised Cape Town communities.
Sara-Jayne Makwala King speaks to Oribi’s managing director – Nthakoana Maema and a beneficiary of the organisation’s Girls in Business programme – Simnikiwe Ntamehlo about the social innovation programme aimed at building entrepreneurship skills for marginalised girls in Cape Town.
Maema says that Girls in Business is an impact incubator that enables a generation of female entrepreneurs with a mission to drive positive social and environmental value in the South African economy to see their ideas come to life.
This is through building entrepreneurship skills, providing them with mentors and coaches and small ticket-sized financial support.
The process is divided into three phases that begin with 100 girls grouped into groups of five girls each where ultimately two groups are chosen as the winning groups whose ideas are morphed and supported into actualisation.
One of the winning groups – Being Alive Again’s aim is to end the generational trauma in township communities by providing counselling support to girls aged 13 to 19 years old who are struggling with mental health issues.
They achieve this through a WhatsApp chat portal that provides basic services like words of affirmation and encouragement. Its advanced services allow girls to book appointments with counsellors at R5 per session.
It’s called Being Alive Again because when you are not mentally stable, when you are depressed, you will find out that you are empty inside, some will feel like they don’t deserve to live, some will want to kill themselves… We are here to bring those people back to life, those people in our townships.
Simnikiwe Ntamehlo, beneficiary – Girls in Business programme
The Oribi Girls in Business programme helps provide the funding for the two winning business ideas through fund raising and funding from corporates, foundations and philanthropists.
With the state of the world, however, securing funding has been difficult.
This hasn’t deterred the organisation from trying to bring about social and environmental change through gender-inclusive youth-based entrepreneurship.
We had to pinch ourselves, we didn’t have the full funding for the Girls in Business but we decided that we’re so passionate about gender inclusion in order to create inclusive economies that we went out there and we were like, ‘we’ll go in and we’ll give what we need to do’.
Nthakoana Maema, managing director – Oribi
We call ourselves ‘the bridging of gaps’ because it’s about bringing in the South African assets, which is our people and bringing them together in order to bring the positive outcome of working with young girls.
Nthakoana Maema, managing director – Oribi
If you are interested in helping the organisation with funding or providing mentorship you can reach out to them through their website here.
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