Changing the world one girl at a time
“Before joining Sasopsbiz Foundation, I used to sit at home and think that I was not going to amount to anything. This was my reality in my neighbourhood and I was at peace with it. Nobody even took my seriously as I was a quiet person minding her business. Now you cannot hide me. I am at your face. I am changing the world. I thought I was ordinary, but I am a extraordinary”
Recently nominated by the Dambuza/Machisa Ward 21 Office of the Councillor Award for the Women led Initiative Category Nobuhle beams with pride when she looks at where she comes from. She sis the only one nominated in her category because of the work that she is doing in her peer education programme.
She says when her AHA! Moment came when she joined to PGEEP and saw young women her age starting businesses, speaking about progressive issues. For the first time she challenged herself and entered a business pitching competition organised for the Hugs. Although she did not win it, but the feedback from the judges actually showed that her ideas were not far off. This propelled her forward and she said I am going to absorb every information, every knowledge, every activity in this programme.
She has participated and led activities in all programmes of Sasops including; business management training, personal development, bootcamp, gender dialogues, financial management skills, job readiness skills. She like the business empowerment part of the programme. She has registered a company and has used her own resources to start a small garden in her home and she sells the vegetables.
The programme that has shone a spotlight on her work is the peer education programme. She has a group of young women that she meets with twice a month and they discuss everything related to their personal growth. They share ideas on how they can grow, find jobs. She has even used her own money that she gets as stipend to share with the groups, She recently gave them R100 each to start a business based on the ideas that they had shared with her. We will see in the next meeting if any of them has used this seed funding wisely.
The passion and the drive that she has for this programme is evidenced by this act of planting in other young women using her own stipend. She is more confident and is no longer to address the public. She says that she has come a long way from this being a despondent young woman who did not know what to do with her future. She is one of the people that mobilise the community to attend the recent Gender Dialogue that was held Dambuza. “My community is my passion and Sasop is my inspiration” she proudly says.