It’s Youth Month—time to celebrate living the legacy

Take five enthusiastic young Unisa engineering students, add a pinch of inspiration and a strong desire to help unemployed women generate an income—and you have a sellable product that can be made cheaply from everyday ingredients found around the home—soap!

Katlego Semenya, who is doing her BTech in Engineering, says it all started with her love of soap and the need to do something with all the oil distilled from plants as part of her studies. After researching recipes, she admits that she unashamedly recruited Professor Diane Hildebrandt and Ralph Muvhiiwa, both from Unisa’s Institute for the Development of Energy for African Sustainability (IDEAS), to supervise the project.

Semenya was soon joined by fellow BTech student Thembelihle Ndlela, along with BSc Chemistry student Kamogelo Sehoole and two MTech Chemical Engineering students, Saneliswa Magagula and Zamanyambose Mthethwa.

Together, the five community-spirited students took on the soap-making project in earnest. Once the recipe had been fine-tuned and endorsed by a local councillor, it was introduced to a group of women from the Inanda community in Durban.

The three-day workshop provided the women with hands-on skills and included community upliftment, the soap-making process, safety precautions, how to extract oil from plants for scent, entrepreneurship, and mentoring.

“They were so welcoming and happy to have us there. I believe many a community’s drawback is its lack of leadership and in this case we were able to provide guidance by taking our skills out of the laboratory and making a positive change,” says Semenya.

The project definitely has legs, which include the inexpensive making of detergent and bath salts, she says.

Setting the wheels in motion

However, the entrepreneurial zeal of these five young students does not stop at soap. Another project in which they are heavily invested is the development of ‘sci-tech mobilabs’—mobile laboratories—so that learners in community schools can do science experiments with laboratory equipment such as conical flasks, burettes and various chemical solutions and compounds.

This idea arose from their participation in the 2017 Sasol TechnoX expo for school learners in grades nine to 12. While speaking to some of the learners attending the expo, the Unisa students realised that many of them did not know what a periodic table was. Clearly, there was a dire need among learners for hands-on access to science skills.

Their mobile lab idea became a reality when Miners Education read about it on the Engineers Without Borders website and made contact with the Unisa team.

Now four universities are involved in the mobile lab project: Unisa, Walter Sisulu University, the University of the Western Cape and the University of Johannesburg. The manufacturers of the mobilabs, Phakamani R&D, are also partners on the project.

The immediate aim is to take mobile labs to 14 schools across South Africa, two per province, says Semenya, adding that the project team are looking for funders to help roll the project out.

A vehicle for sorely needed work-integrated learning

A compelling proposition of the mobilabs project is its dual aims. One is to assist school learners who might otherwise not be able to conduct science experiments because of a lack of laboratory equipment at their schools. The other is to create work-integrated learning (WIL) opportunities for university students, as they would be the ones to take the mobile labs to communities.

Semenya explains: “In fields such as engineering, WIL opportunities are very scarce but you cannot graduate without it. We are all products of that system,” she says, referring to herself and her four teammates, “and each of us had a personal struggle to find WIL opportunities. We were fortunate in that IDEAS took us on as interns but that kind of opportunity does not get to everyone.”

Magagula agrees. “Three years ago when I was doing my BTech, I had no idea how I was going to complete my studies and graduate. My internship at IDEAS gave me that opportunity and motivated me to do my master’s in chemical engineering as well. That wouldn’t have been possible without the opportunity to complete WIL, which can really change your life.”

No wonder these five young students are so passionate about their community projects: the mobilabs have the potential to become a vehicle for creating WIL opportunities for students from Unisa and other universities, while at the same time giving school learners the means to do science experiments.

“Unisa would also benefit as creating WIL opportunities help Unisa to graduate undergraduate students and remove the existing bottlenecks,” says Semenya.

While setting the mobilabs wheels in motion, she and her four teammates are not afraid to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty if that is what it takes. Soap-making is, after all, one of their skills.

Every year on 16 June, South Africa commemorates the 1976 Soweto uprising to pay tribute to learners who stood up against the apartheid government. They stood together and laid down their lives fighting for freedom and the right to equal education.

This year’s Youth Month takes place within the same year that South Africa marks the centenary of both Nelson Mandela and Albertina Sisulu, as well as Unisa’s 145thanniversary.

Youth Month comes less than three months since President Cyril Ramaphosa launched the Youth Employment Service initiative that aims to prepare young people for work through training and matching programmes. It is a business-led initiative in partnership with government, labour and civil society and will offer one million young South Africans paid work experience over the next three years. This year’s theme is Live the legacy: Towards a socio-economically empowered youth.

*By Kirosha Naicker

Source UNISA