Leading the way in tech empowerment
The Covid-19 pandemic that collapsed many organisations arrived five years into the life of the Global Leading Light Initiative (GLLI).
The Eastern Cape NGO, with its base at StendenSA in Port Alfred, not only survived, but thrived and has set ambitious goals for the 2023/24 financial year. Its recent AGM was a window into the breadth and depth of work done and the spread of people it reaches.
GLLI’s three programmes in the past year have been Ibali Lam, for women-owned businesses; IT repairs training for military veterans; and the IT2C Robotics STEM and international exchange programme involving nine US and 10 SA teenagers.
All the programmes have the goal of giving women and youth the technology and skills to achieve their goals.
Ibali Lam is a partnership between GLLI and Bank Seta, Rhodes University, SEDA, Eastern ECDC and Stenden University. It is a digital accelerator with a focus on women-owned businesses.
From July to December 2022, 25 women-owned SMEs were selected from across the Eastern Cape.
The programme included an in-person women in enterprise
leadership boot camp and an immersive business growth bootcamp.
In October 2022, GLLI was awarded a tender from the Eastern Cape office of the premier to train 10 military veterans and their dependents in IT repairs, provide start-up capital, and prepare them for the Cisco IT Essentials certificate.
The project began with inperson mobile phone repairs and entrepreneurship training, followed by enrollment in GLLI’s Cisco Networking Academy for IT Essentials.
Ten participants completed the bootcamp as IT repairs technicians. They each received certificates and a complete set of tools to start businesses.
In September 2021, GLLI received a $63,250 (R1.2m) federal assistance grant award from the US department of state through the Cape Town US Consulate to implement the One Team, Two Continents Ambassador Programme.
A team of nine teenagers from Chicago and 10 teenagers from Port Alfred collaborated, sharing and learning about each other’s cultures while also applying their STEM skills to build a robot that competed in a robotics competition in the US.
Read more about Global Leading Light Initiatives at