Marjolein van Gendt

In South Africa December holidays not only mean Christmas and New Year's Eve, but Summer Holidays as well. This entails long, long, looooong holidays and nobody daring to come near work from 24 December to 3 January at least. People think you're crazy if you do. So slowly the office got emptier, and so did the streets and e-mail inboxes. A nice time to reflect.

I have been here for 9 months now. I have been lucky and experienced the festive atmosphere that the World Cup brought (even though the end result was a bit hard to swallow for me and my countrymen). Never before have I seen an event such as this change a whole country and the way it looked at itself. There was so much pride, such a feeling of unity. And the amazing thing was that all this positivity was channelled through and grown by the media. For those months the newspapers here seemed to have turned into Good News broadcasters – no space for rape and crime in the headlines. A large similarity between the current festive season and the World Cup's one is how hard it was to get work done. Nothing was important except for soccer. So most of the work I have done this year has happened before and after....

That time I have spent setting up my own project, Participatory Entrepreneurship Development. In my earlier blog I have spoken a bit about what this project is all about, and because time has passed and the project developed I can now be more specific. Since April I have developed partnerships with Monash University ( http://www.monash.ac.za/) and the Meraka Institute ( http://www.csir.co.za/meraka/) of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in South Africa. We have had many strategy and planning meetings - I have been blessed to be able to get advice from such experienced people. Our focus has shifted from us as external people doing needs assessment to teaching people in the community how to do it themselves. I have therefore busied myself with research on participatory methods and we are currently finalising a Reference Manual that breaks each method down into easy-to-follow steps.

We have started working in a community called Zandspruit; an informal settlement in the North West of Johannesburg, with an estimated 42,500 inhabitants (26,250 informal, 16,250 formal). There we have identified a group of young people (about 10 people) who already have some ICT and business skills and the wish to start businesses. Starting January we will have a series of workshops to train them in using participatory methods to do a needs assessment in their own community. From February they will do what we would call the fieldwork - and based on their findings we will collaboratively come up with business ideas afterwards. For each participant we will provide assistance in bringing their business idea from seed to running enterprise. It is an exciting time and my wish for 2011 therefore is that this project will run smoothly and provide concrete benefits to all participants.

Wishing all of you the best for 2011!