After interviewing social entrepreneur Luvuyo Rani for Nine Yards magazine, Fiona Zerbst caught up with him to learn more about the Silulo Foundation and its entrepreneurship programme, designed to help entrepreneurs in their businesses.

Fiona Zerbst (FZ): You began Silulo Ulutho Technologies to help those without access to tech to learn digital skills. Why then, did you start a foundation too?

Luvuyo Rani (LR): The Silulo Foundation is a non-profit company – and Public Benefit Organisation (PBO) – that is an extension of Silulo Ulutho Technologies, the company my brother and I founded in 2004 to tackle inequality and the lack of digital access faced by many young South Africans.

We work with aspiring entrepreneurs at our centres and the foundation collaborates with entrepreneurs who are already running businesses. The idea of starting a foundation has been with me for a number of years, but I only began focusing on it in earnest this year once I had stepped down as CEO of Silulo Ulutho Technologies. In February 2023, we launched the Silulo Foundation Entrepreneurship Programme in Khayelitsha, Western Cape.

FZ: What does the programme entail?

LR: It’s a 10-month programme for young people which consists of five pillars – training, mentorship, consulting, connection, and research. The first six weeks are taken up by the bootcamp, which comprises six Saturday-morning classes.

Once these are completed, we continue to mentor and advise participants to ensure that they follow through with the steps required to reach their goals. There are 80 steps in the programme. We work with participants through 25 critical ones and the remainder they can do on their own.

Some of the steps include: acquiring a successful entrepreneur as a mentor; formulating a unique value proposition; choosing a name for their brand; completing a business plan; opening a business bank account; and hiring employees.

I have been involved with many entrepreneurship programmes and the missing part is always the same: the practical application of what was taught and community building. One of the reasons we work in the way we do, is to create social capital and communities.

FZ: On what basis do you select applicants?

LR: The programme targets two types of entrepreneurs – those hoping to grow their side hustle into a lucrative and formal business, and those already running businesses but who may be facing challenges.

Of the 200 applicants we had in the first intake, 70% were already running a business and needed help to grow. We took in 30 and 25 graduated. Among them was a beauty-salon owner with eight salons who was struggling with basic business operations.

Another was a fashion designer with a successful home business who didn’t know how to turn his “business” into a formal business. We also had a scientist who left a career in chemistry to make soap and perfume, and needed help to formalise and scale her business.

Applicants must also have done a SWOT analysis, show that they know their customers and have an operational manual as well as insurance.

We charge each entrepreneur a fee equal to 25% of the cost. It shows that they are committed and really want to learn. It helps us to tell which entrepreneurs are serious about the programme and prepared to invest in themselves.

FZ: As the foundation is a PBO and students don’t pay full fees, do you have other partners that support you?

LR: We get grant funding and have a crowdfunding campaign so that individuals can also contribute. And then there are the fees we get from entrepreneurs.

The University of Notre Dame in the US is a partner. This collaboration is special to me because I’m a product of its Entrepreneurship and Empowerment in South Africa (EESA) programme, which targets historically disadvantaged entrepreneurs from townships around Cape Town.

We’ve also partnered with the Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Western Cape. Its honours and masters students teach on our programme and they get access to our students for their research.

FZ: Is the foundation only Cape Town-based?

LR: We launched in the Western Cape because it’s where Silulo Ulutho Technologies is based, but we’ve already had enquiries from entrepreneurs in Johannesburg. We want to run our programme across the country but to do this we need to partner with other universities in other regions and get more mentors and speakers for bootcamps.

However, we don’t want to deviate from our commitment to improving people’s prospects in townships, so we want to bring it back to the original business and run the foundation from our centres. There are 43 around the country, which will make it easier to scale the foundation’s activities. Tech, which we have at our centres, will enable us to scale the programme but we’ll always have a human element too – I believe that this is very important if you want students to succeed.

I have ambitions for my own business too. I believe that once Silulo Ulutho Technologies has more than 200 centres across the country, we will be in a position to provide e-government services. We already have the know-how – we just need to put the infrastructure in place.

For now, though, my focus is on how the Silulo Foundation can grow the next generation of entrepreneurs, who will find a way to solve our energy, crime and other problems.

For more practical guidance and inspiring interviews with entrepreneurs, read For SMEs on the Old Mutual Corporate Resource Hub.