RAPAPORT... Sanny Fakude’s room might resemble any other teenage dwelling except that it is made out of sand and mud. Fakude, a confident, outgoing 19-year-old lives in the Barberton township in South Africa, 224 miles east of Johannesburg, in a two-room basic brick house that she shares with her brother and his friend. The boys split the rooms between them, so Fakude lives in a shacklike room detached from the small house. The three of them use a small outdoor gas stove as a makeshift kitchen. The outside bathroom lacks modern plumbing.
One of eight children, Fakude is part of the first generation of black youth in South Africa to come of age in a postapartheid world. Without the barriers of segregation imposed by apartheid, Fakude’s generation can theoretically achieve the same economic and social prosperity as the country’s white population. However, the economic, social and cultural obstacles to success are numerous.
The South African government is taking steps, through its Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) initiative, to redress the inequalities of apartheid by giving previously disadvantaged groups, mostly black Africans, new economic opportunities. But even well-intentioned programs are not always enough to overcome the black Africans’ hurdles, as Fakude has learned.
A highly motivated young woman, Fakude dreams of becoming a journalist. Lacking the money to afford journalism school, and without any other viable plans, Fakude landed instead in one of BEE’s beneficiary programs — the Vukani-Ubuntu Community Development Project. The Vukani School teaches jewelry design and manufacturing to disadvantaged black Africans free of charge. Vukani aims to give its students employable skills in the jewelry industry, thereby giving them the means to become self-sustaining adults.
FALSE EXPECTATIONS
Although hailed as a success by some industry insiders — the Vukani school has a 90 percent job placement rate for its graduates and its students have won design awards in student competitions — there exists an underlying concern that the program might be inadvertently feeding false expectations to a generation that doesn’t yet know how to navigate the corridors of success.
Since its founding in 1999, Vukani has graduated only 200 students. The dropout rate is more than 50 percent — only eight out of every 20 students make it through the first year of the intensive 18-month program.
Part of the problem, according to Fana Maseko, one of the the school’s founders and its chief operating officer (COO), is a lack of support at home from parents who do not understand the new autonomous mentality of their children. Almost all of Vukani’s students continue to live in South Africa’s segregated, poverty-stricken townships, the remnants of apartheid. Most students also have parents who are either unemployed or working in low-level domestic and office jobs. “The parents aren’t very supportive to the extent that a student can stick around the program and make it through,” Maseko explains.
Like Fakude, whose brother was working in Barberton and heard about the program, many students find their way into the Vukani program and jewelry manufacturing largely by chance — spurred on only by the desire to “do something different” and to create opportunities for themselves that were denied to their parents. Students who envisioned a glamorous design curriculum are disappointed and often surprised to discover the down-and-dirty machine work of jewelry manufacturing
“I used to love jewelry, but making it is a different thing,” says 23-year-old Millicent Tishivase. “At first I thought, this isn’t a job for a woman because you have to work with big machinery, use hammers and a saw.”
By all expert accounts, Vukani gives its students only the most rudimentary and basic of skills. Students who graduate from the program require a much longer apprenticeship, either under the tutelage of a new employer or in a more advanced program, before they can truly manufacture jewelry themselves.
AFRICAN PRIDE
Alongside the elementary training, however, the school delivers a strong philosophy focused on the importance of self-employment, entrepreneurship and African pride. Its students are clearly absorbing this message; every student interviewed for this article talked about his or her desire to start a business that would utilize Africa’s resources in Africa for the benefit of country and self. Nevertheless, the students — only some of whom have graduated from high school — spend, at most, two weeks learning about entrepreneurship. As they struggle to learn the basics of jewelry design and manufacturing, the experience and knowledge they will need to open up their own businesses is still beyond their reach.
Demos Takoulas, a Vukani founder and chief executive officer (CEO), is aware of the glaring discrepancy between what the school offers and its goals for the students. “Our first mandate was to train unemployed black children. The next step is to set them up with their own businesses within hives,” he explains.
Vukani is slowly approaching that next step. For the students who do not find employment upon graduation, the school has created a learning unit for them to study basic business management. Within this sheltered environment, students practice writing invoices, planning production schedules and pricing products. The students only remain in the unit, however, until they are able to find employment elsewhere.
Maskeo also notes that even if graduates are not technically prepared to start their own businesses, they can still obtain starting salaries close to at $258 a month, more than twice the amount of a new employee who didn’t receive training.
Graduates like Abel Molokomme are considered a classic success story. Having finished the program in 2005, Molokomme now works for a small jewelry manufacturer in Johannesburg. Nevertheless, Molokomme still lives in a township peppered with homes like the one in which Sanny Fakude lives.
Even though he is a long way from owning his own business, Molokomme is not disappointed with the results, crediting Vukani with showing him a different perspective on life. “I still have a dream of opening up my own business and I believe in African jewelry,” he says.
Article from the Rapaport Magazine - June 2007. To subscribe click here.