Featured Grantee of WHEAT Trust
Manci Siqalile Community Service
The Manci Siqalile Community Service exists to strengthen the agency of the community of Ward 9 in Mhlontlo Local Municipality, in the Eastern Cape. The organisation strives for enhanced social cohesion and life chances for all members of the community, especially it’s women, children and youth. Established in 2009 and registered with the Department of Social Development in 2011, the organisation is still effectively in the pioneering stage.
The organisation was named in honour of 86 year-old Mrs. Princess Mamanci Siwahla. “Manci”, as she is popularly known in the community, has throughout her life been at the forefront of development in the Lotana Community. She played a leading role in the establishment of the local clinic in the late 1970s and local high school in the late 1980s, among other community initiatives. She and other community leaders had a number of barriers associated with the apartheid era to break and achieve these milestones. In turn, the organisation’s name explains that a younger generation of women is ready to take the baton and their commitment to the process of the Lotana Community Development will be taken to greater heights in line with Manci’s long-lived vision of a self-reliant and sustainable community.
The organisation was established against the background of urban migration due to absence of development in the local area, leaving the community without the human resources necessary to arrest the downward spiral. Hence there is recognition of the need to revitalize the community so that it recaptures its agency for own development. A main aim of Manci Siqalile Community Service is to ensure that children and the youth remain in the community until they are in a position to venture into the world, and do not end up in the squalid urban peripheral areas like most youth who have not been able to finish school.
Currently the projects being carried out include informal crèches run by women in the village. They are able to provide children’s furniture, educational equipment and toys, cooking utensils along with one meal for breakfast time. Holiday playgroups have also been organized for children between six and thirteen years of age.
These powerful women also have great aspirations and visions for the future. They hope to better train their caregivers, to organise monthly play groups for school-going children, carry out environmental awareness and training, culture and heritage awareness and training as well as social mobilization for community development.
With a grant from the WHEAT Trust, Manci Siqalile Community Service was able to organise and facilitate training of caregivers in running and management of ECD (Early Childhood Development) centres. They also decided to extend the training to other women in the community who run community-based organizations or who aspire to start such organisations on the Lotana Village and that could benefit from this opportunity.
Eleven women, including the facilitator, participated in the event. Five young and unemployed single mothers, and one adult woman applied for participation in the training, and were accepted. Three were committee members of Manci Siqalile, two were practitioners at the community preschool. A founder member and secretary of Manci Siqalile, facilitated the learning.
The training was delivered in isiXhosa, which is the home language of the learners and the facilitator, although the learning and training material was mainly in English (only major heading and in some instances subheading were also translated into Xhosa for easy reference). Three major topics were covered, namely NPO Registration, Organisational Development, and Introduction to Management and Running of Early Childhood Development (ECD) Centres.
The facilitation sought to mobilise women of Lotana Village for sustainable community development through dissemination of information and knowledge. The intervention is expected to lead to creation and proliferation of community-based development initiates; to enhance community agency for development in line with the community’s priorities and readily available and/or accessible resources. The participants need to understand the amount of work involved for groups that wish to grow their organisations in a professional way, and the already existing groups must be able to take stock of their organisations’ position and take necessary action to enhance or improve their situation.
The learning event took place as a three-day workshop conducted in the local Methodist Church hall that was generously made available. The facilitator observed that by the end of the workshop the level of critical awareness with regards to own agency for development had increased. Two learners had in the past participated in income-generation initiatives, one through sewing, and another through vegetable production. They realised how their groups lost their agency to government officials in their quest for funding.
The understanding of the distinction between profit-making organisations, and non-profit organisations was demonstrated during the action planning. One group planned to start a non-profit making preschool alongside a profit-making sewing project. The need for community mobilisation before starting any initiative emerged strongly during the discussion of the action plans. The importance of acquiring relevant knowledge before any initiative was also highlighted throughout. Knowledge would ensure success and sustainability of efforts, as groups would know exactly their goal, and the necessary processes to reach that goal. A great achievement is that the ward councillor has indicated his intention to introduce the organisation to the local municipal Local Economic Development (LED) Officer.
For the future as a medium to long-term plan, Manci Siqalile aims to run regular workshops in which asset-based community development approaches will be used to lay ground for in-depth visioning and leadership. The immediate plan is to conduct a hands-on exercise on project development and budgeting in preparation for the Lotto Charities Call for Funding Application. The organisation plans to submit a funding application to extend its ECD programme. It is in the process of negotiating a free auditing service from an Umtata-based auditing firm so that it can apply on its own as part of their CSI (Corporate Social Investment). A well-established Umtata-based NGO has already agreed to be Manci Siqalile’s senior partner in case the auditing arrangement does not materialise.
WHEAT Trust is proud to have funded this event under our Seed Funding Grant category due to the incredibly powerful outcomes that have resulted from its taking place. Manci Siqalile is growing in terms of governance and accountability, leading to an enhanced sustainability of the organisation that is strengthening its capacity in raising awareness of gender equality, social development and women empowerment. Women in the organisation as well as the community, now have an increasing appreciation of their capabilities and leadership in their homes and in their community.
The Manci Siqalile Community Service exists to strengthen the agency of the community of Ward 9 in Mhlontlo Local Municipality, in the Eastern Cape. The organisation strives for enhanced social cohesion and life chances for all members of the community, especially it’s women, children and youth. Established in 2009 and registered with the Department of Social Development in 2011, the organisation is still effectively in the pioneering stage.
The organisation was named in honour of 86 year-old Mrs. Princess Mamanci Siwahla. “Manci”, as she is popularly known in the community, has throughout her life been at the forefront of development in the Lotana Community. She played a leading role in the establishment of the local clinic in the late 1970s and local high school in the late 1980s, among other community initiatives. She and other community leaders had a number of barriers associated with the apartheid era to break and achieve these milestones. In turn, the organisation’s name explains that a younger generation of women is ready to take the baton and their commitment to the process of the Lotana Community Development will be taken to greater heights in line with Manci’s long-lived vision of a self-reliant and sustainable community.
The organisation was established against the background of urban migration due to absence of development in the local area, leaving the community without the human resources necessary to arrest the downward spiral. Hence there is recognition of the need to revitalize the community so that it recaptures its agency for own development. A main aim of Manci Siqalile Community Service is to ensure that children and the youth remain in the community until they are in a position to venture into the world, and do not end up in the squalid urban peripheral areas like most youth who have not been able to finish school.
Currently the projects being carried out include informal crèches run by women in the village. They are able to provide children’s furniture, educational equipment and toys, cooking utensils along with one meal for breakfast time. Holiday playgroups have also been organized for children between six and thirteen years of age.
These powerful women also have great aspirations and visions for the future. They hope to better train their caregivers, to organise monthly play groups for school-going children, carry out environmental awareness and training, culture and heritage awareness and training as well as social mobilization for community development.
With a grant from the WHEAT Trust, Manci Siqalile Community Service was able to organise and facilitate training of caregivers in running and management of ECD (Early Childhood Development) centres. They also decided to extend the training to other women in the community who run community-based organizations or who aspire to start such organisations on the Lotana Village and that could benefit from this opportunity.
Eleven women, including the facilitator, participated in the event. Five young and unemployed single mothers, and one adult woman applied for participation in the training, and were accepted. Three were committee members of Manci Siqalile, two were practitioners at the community preschool. A founder member and secretary of Manci Siqalile, facilitated the learning.
The training was delivered in isiXhosa, which is the home language of the learners and the facilitator, although the learning and training material was mainly in English (only major heading and in some instances subheading were also translated into Xhosa for easy reference). Three major topics were covered, namely NPO Registration, Organisational Development, and Introduction to Management and Running of Early Childhood Development (ECD) Centres.
The facilitation sought to mobilise women of Lotana Village for sustainable community development through dissemination of information and knowledge. The intervention is expected to lead to creation and proliferation of community-based development initiates; to enhance community agency for development in line with the community’s priorities and readily available and/or accessible resources. The participants need to understand the amount of work involved for groups that wish to grow their organisations in a professional way, and the already existing groups must be able to take stock of their organisations’ position and take necessary action to enhance or improve their situation.
The learning event took place as a three-day workshop conducted in the local Methodist Church hall that was generously made available. The facilitator observed that by the end of the workshop the level of critical awareness with regards to own agency for development had increased. Two learners had in the past participated in income-generation initiatives, one through sewing, and another through vegetable production. They realised how their groups lost their agency to government officials in their quest for funding.
The understanding of the distinction between profit-making organisations, and non-profit organisations was demonstrated during the action planning. One group planned to start a non-profit making preschool alongside a profit-making sewing project. The need for community mobilisation before starting any initiative emerged strongly during the discussion of the action plans. The importance of acquiring relevant knowledge before any initiative was also highlighted throughout. Knowledge would ensure success and sustainability of efforts, as groups would know exactly their goal, and the necessary processes to reach that goal. A great achievement is that the ward councillor has indicated his intention to introduce the organisation to the local municipal Local Economic Development (LED) Officer.
For the future as a medium to long-term plan, Manci Siqalile aims to run regular workshops in which asset-based community development approaches will be used to lay ground for in-depth visioning and leadership. The immediate plan is to conduct a hands-on exercise on project development and budgeting in preparation for the Lotto Charities Call for Funding Application. The organisation plans to submit a funding application to extend its ECD programme. It is in the process of negotiating a free auditing service from an Umtata-based auditing firm so that it can apply on its own as part of their CSI (Corporate Social Investment). A well-established Umtata-based NGO has already agreed to be Manci Siqalile’s senior partner in case the auditing arrangement does not materialise.
WHEAT Trust is proud to have funded this event under our Seed Funding Grant category due to the incredibly powerful outcomes that have resulted from its taking place. Manci Siqalile is growing in terms of governance and accountability, leading to an enhanced sustainability of the organisation that is strengthening its capacity in raising awareness of gender equality, social development and women empowerment. Women in the organisation as well as the community, now have an increasing appreciation of their capabilities and leadership in their homes and in their community.
Featured Grantee of WHEAT Trust
Masiphumelele Women’s Support Group Network
The Masiphumelele Women’s Support Group Network was established by a group of South African women who came together to promote human rights for all women. Masiphumelele underwent a significant transformation when they began partnering with immigrant and refugee women within the township of Masiphumelele, thereby increasing their vision to promote the human rights of all women who live in South Africa, and not just South African citizens.
The network was established when the women noticed that immigrant women often face the same challenges in the community as their South African counterparts. The South African women came to this realisation when they attended a “Building Bridges” workshop, hosted by PASSOP, where issues such as integration, communal problems and abuse of women were addressed. For most of the women, it was the first time to attend a workshop where they could openly discuss the issue of gender-based violence, and afterwards the women decided to join forces to fight their challenges together.
This joining of forces by South African and Zimbabwean women in Cape Town against gender-based violence also resulted in a joint collaboration to address the problem of xenophobia within the Cape Town community. Xenophobia remains a major problem in our communities, and the 2008 xenophobic attacks highlighted the scale and severity of this discrimination. Through sharing experiences with each other, the South African women realised that migrant and refugee women are often marginalised in their communities, and rarely purposefully included in other community and neighbourhood development projects. As such, the network decided that one of their key objectives would be to ensure that the voices of migrant and refugee women are heard in developmental processes that affect them.
The Network holds bi-monthly dialogues between migrant and South African women, where participants share their experiences and concerns, thereby empowering themselves and those around them. The Zimbabwean members of the group have shared that they have been raised to not discuss their private problems in public, and this makes it difficult to surface the extent of the problem within the immigrant community. They articulated the need for a place of support where they can go to discuss their private problems, and as a result Masiphumelele now also runs a gender help-desk, alongside an anti-xenophobia help desk, twice a week at the offices of PASSOP (People against Suffering Oppression and Poverty). Through this helpdesk women are provided with a safe space to seek support; they can access counselling, and are referred to rape crisis centres where they can find assistance with filing cases at local police stations.
This culture of silence that surrounds gender-based violence crosses cultural divides, and as such, these bi-monthly meetings are providing a safe space for both groups of women to share, learn about their rights, and support each other. The women have started two income-generating projects, bead-making and a sewing project, and engaging in these activities have also provided them with a further space to discuss, share and support each other, whilst at the same time working towards income-generation.
During the first year of their existence, Masiphumelele is growing from strength to strength in carrying out their aims of raising awareness about gender-based violence, advocate for gender equality, and the promotion of rights of all women who live in Cape Town, in particular, and South Africa in general. What stands out about this organisation is how women are actively pursuing the building of relationships across cultures and nationalities, thereby providing an alternative to xenophobia, through the sharing of experiences, and education about each other’s lives as women. It is the realisation that women’s rights are also universal human rights, and that powerful alternatives to address the inequality of women can be to be found when women, from different locations, find the bridges to connect their struggles.
The Masiphumelele Women’s Support Group Network was established by a group of South African women who came together to promote human rights for all women. Masiphumelele underwent a significant transformation when they began partnering with immigrant and refugee women within the township of Masiphumelele, thereby increasing their vision to promote the human rights of all women who live in South Africa, and not just South African citizens.
The network was established when the women noticed that immigrant women often face the same challenges in the community as their South African counterparts. The South African women came to this realisation when they attended a “Building Bridges” workshop, hosted by PASSOP, where issues such as integration, communal problems and abuse of women were addressed. For most of the women, it was the first time to attend a workshop where they could openly discuss the issue of gender-based violence, and afterwards the women decided to join forces to fight their challenges together.
This joining of forces by South African and Zimbabwean women in Cape Town against gender-based violence also resulted in a joint collaboration to address the problem of xenophobia within the Cape Town community. Xenophobia remains a major problem in our communities, and the 2008 xenophobic attacks highlighted the scale and severity of this discrimination. Through sharing experiences with each other, the South African women realised that migrant and refugee women are often marginalised in their communities, and rarely purposefully included in other community and neighbourhood development projects. As such, the network decided that one of their key objectives would be to ensure that the voices of migrant and refugee women are heard in developmental processes that affect them.
The Network holds bi-monthly dialogues between migrant and South African women, where participants share their experiences and concerns, thereby empowering themselves and those around them. The Zimbabwean members of the group have shared that they have been raised to not discuss their private problems in public, and this makes it difficult to surface the extent of the problem within the immigrant community. They articulated the need for a place of support where they can go to discuss their private problems, and as a result Masiphumelele now also runs a gender help-desk, alongside an anti-xenophobia help desk, twice a week at the offices of PASSOP (People against Suffering Oppression and Poverty). Through this helpdesk women are provided with a safe space to seek support; they can access counselling, and are referred to rape crisis centres where they can find assistance with filing cases at local police stations.
This culture of silence that surrounds gender-based violence crosses cultural divides, and as such, these bi-monthly meetings are providing a safe space for both groups of women to share, learn about their rights, and support each other. The women have started two income-generating projects, bead-making and a sewing project, and engaging in these activities have also provided them with a further space to discuss, share and support each other, whilst at the same time working towards income-generation.
During the first year of their existence, Masiphumelele is growing from strength to strength in carrying out their aims of raising awareness about gender-based violence, advocate for gender equality, and the promotion of rights of all women who live in Cape Town, in particular, and South Africa in general. What stands out about this organisation is how women are actively pursuing the building of relationships across cultures and nationalities, thereby providing an alternative to xenophobia, through the sharing of experiences, and education about each other’s lives as women. It is the realisation that women’s rights are also universal human rights, and that powerful alternatives to address the inequality of women can be to be found when women, from different locations, find the bridges to connect their struggles.
