Cafés serve youngsters in the Cape a main course that tastes of hope

Since passing matric more than three years ago, Axola Dungulu, 22, has never worked for more than two months in any one job. 

"The longest contract that I ever got was a two-month admin job. The few odd jobs that I did only lasted for a month, and occasionally I would do people's hair just to keep myself occupied," she said.

Growing up in the poverty-stricken Cape Town community of Khayelitsha harmed her self-esteem, she said, and a lack of role models "made me to feel less worthy" of anything good.

But Dungulu has just started her own business selling beauty products that she delivers to her clients.

She gives credit for her new entrepreneurial passion to a youth café – an initiative of the Western Cape social development department – which equipped her with skills either to find a job or start a business.

Each of the province’s 12 youth cafés provides after-school care and tutoring in life skills and school subjects such as maths. The cafés are operated by a non-governmental organisations under contract to the department.

This month, social development MEC Albert Fritz opened the latest youth café in the Crossroads/Philippi area, where it will be run in partnership with the City of Cape Town and an NGO, Ikamva Labantwana Bethu.

Dungulu, who attended a Mitchells Plain youth café known as I am Passion, said if it were not for the leadership course she took there, she would not have had the courage to start  her own business.

"Before I started, I didn’t even know what I wanted to study post matric. Being an entrepreneur is not even something that I imagined," she said.

"I always looked for basic jobs such as working as a shop assistant because I thought that's the best I could do. To be honest I never saw myself getting out of lokshin management  [a colloquial term for unemployment)."

During the eight-week leadership programme - which taught Dungulu and her peers how to brainstorm business ideas, regain self-esteem and tackle public speaking – she found an entrepreneurial side "which I never knew even existed".

She now dreams of opening a spa in Khayelitsha after she completes her beauty therapy studies.

"I now know exactly what I want. I want to be a businesswoman and I want to open my business here so that people from Khayelitsha don’t have to go outside to look beautiful," she said.

Fritz said almost 56,000 young people have gone through youth café skills development programmes, and the aim now is to open a café in every municipality.

"When we opened the doors to our first youth café just five years ago, it was an exciting new initiative and we were very anxious to see whether the concept would be accepted by young people," he said.

"We started out small but ambitious. Today, our youth cafés receive about 10,000 visits a month."

The youth cafés in Oudtshoorn, George, Vrygrond and Groot Brak seem to be the most popular due to their life skills programmes such as carpentry, cosmetology, and baking and barista courses.

Amandla youth café in Nyanga trains young people in sports science to keep them off the streets and out of harm's way.