Lusikisiki Youth Foundation is a South African-incorporated social investment company that focuses on developing solutions to social problems through education, innovation, and community development. They are a Not-For-Profit Company(NPC) in terms of the Companies Act and a Non-Profit Organisation (NPO) as per the Department of Social Development. “Our mission is to fight the social ill that our stakeholders face through the provision of practical innovative solutions through inclusive education, entrepreneurship, and community development focus,” explains Machule Hophu founder of the organization.
Lusikisiki Youth Foundation was founded in January 2015 by four tertiary students, Hopu Machule(UFH alumni), Malindi Bonga(WITS alumni), Mbombo Siphamandla(WITS alumni), and Mxinwa Luvo (Inge TVET College alumni). The primary motivation that these students felt was an informational gap about post-matric opportunities in rural areas in the Eastern Cape due to a lack of resources such as internet access.
“The foundation was born with a mandate to first motivate the grade 12 learners in January every year, give them some career advice with the promise that in winter holidays we will come back with post matric schooling opportunities and help them with applications,” he says.
He adds that when they decided to remodel their solution technique to be integrated as such that they can solve problems and link the solution to a systematic benefitting integrated system and engage with both the SMMMEs, big corporate companies, and the public sector to cater to their solutions.
As they do this without any funding as a group, they managed to help a few schools in the O.R TAMBO DISTRICT with career guidance, mentoring tertiary applications, extra classes, and distribution of information to mention a few they went to MGEZWA S.S.S, QAKATHISA J.S.S, SOBABA S.S.S, etc.
Their current initiatives.
- Education: Extra classes in Mathematics, Science, and Accounting. They provide extra classes such as afternoons, weekends, and holidays for learners who are interested in improving their disciplines.
- Crime: Host sports community tournaments where they encourage everyone in their communities to develop their natural talents by participating in sports.
- Unemployment, Poverty, and Inequality: Employment programs to assist job seekers in looking for jobs and starting businesses and hire each other for equity stakes if possible.
“Our challenges id that we do have access to financial resources to implement effectively our initiatives, understaffed as we lack financial incentives for prospective members who want to be of our organization, and we have no offices which leads us to not being a formal organization with a growth prospect,” he says.
He adds that as a team they have a Spaza Shop Incubation program that they want to publish and raise awareness to the public and raise an amount of about R750 thousand as a foundation for all of their initiatives to be a success.
