South Africa today is a sea of youth with no direction, no guidance. These kids roam about the townships. They grow up in shacks in squatter camps.
Those kids, they don't have educated parents, and they grow up and their mothers are not working. They don't have anybody to look up to.
In the township, in actual fact, being a failure is accepted. Nobody is going to punish you for that, nobody is going to tell you to dream big, nobody is going to tell you anything.
So it's actually a huge challenge that we're facing in this country, which is to try to pull the youth back.
Traditionally, people have always looked at Africa as a basket case and they have said, Africans are not able to do it for themselves. So when they are sick, we send medicines.
But when people are starving to death there's a food drop somewhere , and the food disappears or it goes rotten.
As far as we're concerned, that's a superficial way of thinking about development.
Africans have genius , they have the ability to create for themselves. And it was really around that philosophy that we decided to start to create the first free university in South Africa.
Come free, come free. Let's go to class. Come come come come, how are you doing?
We wanted to prove that it was possible to take a child off the streets who had come through a very disadvantaged education, and turn them into a chartered accountant, turn them into a merchant banker, a stockbroker, Java programmer. Because if we could prove that it was possible, we could take the country forward into a new reality.
Follow next three years. Do nothing else but work towards your vision. You cannot copy your friend's vision. See it, guys, please, picture it.
Do you have a vision of your own?
Yeah.
Specifics. I even know the color of my car . Guess what, it's black.
Most universities, it's a money-based model. The students have to pay a lot of money, the faculty get paid a lot of money, everything is just expensive. We're just, like, you know a mother teaches her child for free. Education should be free.
Yeah, I see it. I think you guys have quite a good job. I used to come out there and it was really well run.
Cida's unique in that our students run the campus itself. And obviously helps us to cut down lot of cost. We've got our cleaning services, we've got your basic operations.
By having our students run the campus they start to understand basic principles of management, basic principles of operations. As a result, by time they go out to the workplace they've already been acquiring a certain level of skills.
We've had to find a way of getting materials , teachers, money, making it accessible, so that we could reinvent this paradigm of University.
If we get the support and if people adopt these ideas, we could open up universities, colleges vocational schools and relevant high schools right across the hull of Africa for next to nothing and they could be fully self sufficient.
It was tough man growing up. Not much resources, not much money, not much.
I was raised in Orange Farm, by a single mother with time would not have money or lunch.
When going to school. I have nothing to eat. I go to school, I have nothing to eat.
I mean, when I got to sea I was just 17. I had been taking drugs at that point and when I've when I came here it was a completely different environment.
He was just wild in the beginning, he was insane. And slowly but surely he started to completely transform his life.
It's been like a quantum leap in growth for me. I have grown many fold.
Filly how is it going, all good?
He's now created his own school in Orange Farm out of nothing. He's just taken the cedar example and I think he's got 25 students of his own, and he is an amazing, amazing human being.
Announcement. Guys, we are going to be having the high speed internet connection.
In a month's time. Now it's confirmed.
In South Africa we have this concept of "Ubuntu" that is I am who I am because we are who we are. That we all belong to each other.
None of us exist in isolation.
Tekiso is one of many , many students whose proving this concept of Ubuntu giving so much more than we could have ever dreamed back into his community.
I started off living in a shack. It was a bit challenging to get your things done.
You would have to pick a time in the middle of the night where you're going to wake up and go sit in the kitchen and you would have your little spot and start doing your own homework, and so it was quite a challenge.
Mina grew up in Soweto, her mother died when she was in her second last year of school.
I was angry, I think I didn't want to go on.
I said, "Why?
Why me? Why now?
Why doing this to us?" I had no plan. here in South Africa today to find a young person who grew up in a normal, stable family. They just pretty much don't exist. Cida found her, brought her into the university.
I believe the Cida believed in me.
From that experience I have learned to believe in myself.
I have learned to believe that if I think, just a slightest thought that I can do this, I have the potential to do that.
She got snapped up into a job, in fact, she's out working at SAP out of Germany.
It's one of the biggest software companies in the world.
Knock, Knock.
She is still living in Soweto where she grew up in the family house, and she is now supporting her sister.
So she's pretty much become the breadwinner of this family of orphans.
Typically, people say that it takes a community to raise a child.
Cida says no.
It takes a child to raise a village.
Now every month I buy groceries for my family. I send them money.
Two months ago we started a business for my mum selling clothes and shoes. That gives me a really, really deep joy.
I am gaining happiness because I know this is the beginning of a new life. Sometimes when you are on a situation of poverty, you don't believe that you might come out of it just like that. After to how many years, I can see where we are going now. I'm proud of him.
And I hope that one day I will be able to build, a really big house. You know she should love, my mom should live like a queen. She is a queen, of my heart.
Today we have 3,300 graduates earning 25 million US dollars in salaries this year, and that's money going back to families that just had absolutely nothing.
So we're creating human chain, a human network and I do believe it could change Africa I do believe we could change the developing world, if we could create a human network where everybody's holding hands. It's only really selfishness that stops us from building stable, decent societies.
When we come to see that we're all from different backgrounds, but something makes us one. We have this will, we have this drive, we have this passion of wanting to bring change.
It encourages its students to really fly high. Really, really go even beyond the skies.
It creates leaders. We are the leaders of this country.
And this is really what Cida's trying to do, is be a life raft that pulls people out of this majority of the population, into the other side of the river, where there is employment and opportunity and as we pull them, they pull everybody else behind them, and that is what our model is.
