Etafeni Sponsorship Poster
September 21, 2023
Sinazo and Asemahle completing their forms at Etafeni before sending them to the Department of Education
November 6, 2023
When we celebrated 20 years of Etafeni in action in 2021, we carved a new pathway of survival and strengthening the organisation’s resources. We also looked at the strides we’d made over the years in realising our mission of creating a flourishing community in Nyanga, Cape Town. Now, two years on, the work of Etafeni and the people of Nyanga is an inspirational story of the power of the human spirit to transcend overwhelming challenges and the many and varied obstacles faced by the community.
Since its inception, Etafeni has worked with the community of Nyanga to bring about change and break the cycle of poverty. The Etafeni Day Care Centre Trust was set up in 2001 to support women, orphans and vulnerable children, by offering a safe space for mothers and children to access quality education, skills development and social welfare support. Today Etafeni boasts a multi-purpose facility that delivers a variety of
educational and social welfare programmes as well as outreach programmes to underserved communities in Nyanga. From the outset, Etafeni responded to the alarmingly high infection rates of the rampant HIV and AIDS epidemic, which continues to be present in Nyanga and its surrounding areas. As well as suffering from underdevelopment, Nyanga is one of South Africa’s most dangerous townships and has unmatched rates of homicide, assault and rape. Unemployment and poverty continue to cripple the community, leading to an ever-increasing
crime rate.
Today we celebrate heroes like Mama Rose Mbude,a social changer/disruptor living in Nyanga who saw the lack of safe play spaces for children, and a need for proper early childhood facilities in the area. With the few resources she had, she took action to change the narrative. In those early days, the space we now occupy was just a deserted open field. This was transformed, brick by brick, into a multi-purpose building which houses Etafeni’s 103 staff members, 9 volunteers and an average of 276 beneficiaries who visit the centre daily. The community has always been at the heart of everything that Etafeni has done, starting with the unemployed women and men from Nyanga who participated in the construction of Etafeni. They were trained in block-making and bricklaying, plastering, painting and carpentry, and built Etafeni, earning stipends for their work.
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