Aleya Ramparsad Banwari

There are many paths to entrepreneurship. For Aleya Ramparsad Banwari, it took Covid-19 and being laid off for her to go the entrepreneurship route. The 24-year-old Banwari and two friends co-founded Grabagrad – a Cape Town-based graduate-led innovation and strategy consulting firm specialising in “disruptive solutions”.

“The company’s services include, but are not limited to, business automation, marketing, design and web development. The company also trains graduates to utilise in-demand softwares within each of our service offerings.

“We employ 17 full-time employees and have provided basic training to 65 graduates. We have also provided advanced training and placement on contracts at Grabagrad to 28 graduates.

“The company is majority womxn-owned and most of our permanent staff are womxn,” says Banwari, who was born in Newcastle, Kwazulu-natal, and moved to Cape Town in 2006.

Banwari’s CV reads like the stuff of dreams. As a matriculant in 2015 and a first year student in 2016, she published a piece of prose titled How Do You Say Your Name?

In 2017, in her second year Bachelor of Social Science (Bsocsc) degree at the University of Cape Town (UCT), she received a class medal for industrial sociology.

In the third year, she was awarded the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship and travelled to Chicago, USA, for six weeks, completing a summer programme at the University of Chicago and graduating in Bsocsc in 2019.

After receiving an honours degree in social anthropology at UCT, she was awarded the David and Elaine Potter Fellowship in 2020 to pursue her masters in public health at the university.

Banwari also owns two ventures with the same partners: a non-governmental organisation called the 16th of June Movement and The African Way Coffee.

As a queer womxn of colour working in academia and the tech space, you have to work twice to prove yourself as these sectors are traditionally male-dominated. This is slowly changing