Primestars Marketing announced the winners of its 2017 Step up 2 a Start-up IV youth entrepreneurship programme at an award ceremony in Pretoria yesterday.
The programme is aimed at learners in grades 9 - 11 and this year's theme: 'Seeking Opportunity, Connecting People and Creating Sustainable Value', focused on social entrepreneurship. The finalists were awarded prizes (valued over R1.5 million), including business incubation, bursaries and cash.
The top nine entrepreneurial teams who demonstrated the most innovative social or environmental business model were selected through a national competition and three-stage adjudication process, says Primestars Marketing. The teams were then brought to Johannesburg for a five-day intensive entrepreneurship boot camp. The initiative consisted of four components: an educational feature film, an entrepreneurs' toolkit and a national youth start-up business competition as well as a boot camp and awards ceremony.
The winners of this completion were grade 11 students from Pace Secondary School in Soweto. Both aged 16, Fisokuhle Lushaba and Wendy Nkosi came up with an Education Guide app that allows students to compare universities, sponsorship, tuition, and majors that they can take on one platform, without having to browse through hours of university and bursar Web sites.
The students say the app also creates and maintains a database of students which the universities subscribe to have access to.
According to Martin Sweet, MD for Primestars Marketing, the programme's aim is to inspire a mindset of entrepreneurship and creation early on in the career development process of students.
"Promoting and enabling the next generation of African entrepreneurs is both a business and moral imperative.... By adapting the lean start-up methodology, we have created an educational process that can easily be taught to and applied by school-going youth."
Referencing Statistics SA, Sweet said SA unemployment is at 27.7%, and that among the youth, joblessness in 15 to 34 years old group is at 38.6%.
To solve the unemployment challenge, Sweet said the country has to embrace mass innovation and entrepreneurship, and in so doing seize the opportunities of the new development paradigm by nurturing an environment that embraces new ideas and supports new business.
"We need youth with an entrepreneurial mindset who can promote inclusion, adaptation and be open to new ideas." Sweet noted however that it can only be possible if the education system in SA is re-tooled to maximise needed skills such as coding, critical thinking, maths and entrepreneurship, as well as improvisation at every level.
This Step up 2 a Start-up initiative empowers today's youth to be tomorrow's entrepreneurs and presents a new vision of education that instils creativity and initiative at the very heart of the learning process, he said.
Destinee Regan and Sumaiya Lagardien, both 16 and from Westering High School in the Western Cape, came in second. The duo's business idea entails re-purposing tyres to make roof tiles for low-cost houses.
Given Mofomme and Shaun Ngobeni, grade 11 students from Nellmapius Secondary School in Mamelodi, Pretoria, who are aged 19 and 16 respectively, came third. Their business idea is to use a fleet of cargo bicycles to provide households with convenient recycling services from the waste in their households.
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