From poverty to opportunity: Kliptown initiative gives hope to impoverished children

‘Poverty is made by people and it can be eradicated by people.” This is the firm belief of Thulani Madondo, co-founder and executive director of the Kliptown Youth Program (KYP), an organisation that gives impoverished children control of their futures through knowledge and nurturing.

Wrapped up in layers of clothing on an icy day, Madondo radiates warmth and optimism. He is speaking from KYP’s temporary premises while a new campus is being constructed. It will have its own sports field as well as user-friendly modern buildings.

The vision shared by Madondo and a small group of friends 14 years ago — to start an initiative that would help lift their community out of poverty through education — has seen KYP grow into an internationally recognised project with multiple uplifting arms.

Born and raised in Kliptown, Madondo grew up in a one-room home with seven siblings, a situation replicated year on year by many in the informal settlement. He would have liked to be an accountant but his maths marks did not match his accountancy achievements, so he became a Soweto tour guide while working for community outreach programmes.

“Growing up in an area like Kliptown can make you feel like you don’t have control over your life,” Madondo says. “When you look at the challenges around you, you don’t have any point of reference in terms of success. This made me want to be one of the people making a difference in the community.”

He and his fellow visionaries began making contact with donor organisations abroad. In 2007, they scraped together the R500 needed to open a business bank account, then Madondo sold his Toyota Conquest and bought a plane ticket to the US, where he presented his plan to anyone willing to listen.

“When I came back I had raised close to $10,000 [about R145,000 at today’s rates]. We used it to buy school uniforms for the kids of Kliptown, then we hired qualified people to teach English and maths and hired a professional to keep our admin and accounts in good order.

“We always knew that to do this work we needed to be transparent and accountable to every donor, every parent, every stakeholder. Getting our first clean audit and being able to register as a public benefit organisation helped us raise further funds.

“Since Kliptown is a tourist destination, we started partnering with tour operators so that when people visited Soweto they could come here and learn about our lives and the things we aspire to do as a community. That exposed us to more people willing to help. AVI/National Brands was our first local sponsor. They gave us R250,000 in 2009, which was a big boost for us.”

Another boost came in 2012, when Madondo was named one of the Top 10 CNN Heroes, chosen out of 45,000 nominations from 100 countries.

“That led to media exposure that gave people an idea about who we are and what we do,” he says. “Working in the middle of a squatter camp in Soweto doesn’t make it easy for everyone to get here and see what we do. So we were so grateful that there were people who were willing to tell our story because even though we are from a very highly poverty-stricken community, our goal is not to advertise poverty but to find ways to overcome it.”KYP’s motto is “from poverty to opportunities”.

Its key intervention is the homework assistance programme, which serves almost 1,000 children from Kliptown and three neighbouring communities every weekday afternoon, with additional holiday programmes.

No-one can learn on an empty stomach, so food assistance is just as vital. “We provide two meals a day to all our members,” says Madondo. “For breakfast they get four slices of bread with some spreads or cheese or polony, then when we welcome them back from school they get a hot cooked meal before being helped with whatever homework they have and receiving computer literacy training.”

The centre has more than 100 devices connected to the internet to help children do research and online learning, which are also available to any community member needing the internet for job searches and applications.

Every year KYP buys school uniforms for all its members and pays their school fees. “Few families around here can afford R800 for a school uniform so we take on that responsibility,” says Madondo. They also help those who are academically strong to look for scholarship opportunities. “We have four kids at Spark schools, six kids at Jeppe Prep, one at Jeppe Boys, seven at Jeppe Girls and one at St Stithians as a recipient of their first Memorial Scholarship.”

Over the past 14 years, KYP has helped more than 80 students graduate from college and university.

“Most of those are now working as professionals in various fields,” says Madondo proudly. “They continue to support the organisation through their skills, their time, and monthly financial contributions, but that happens voluntarily. For us, whenever any young person succeeds, that is our achievement. We don’t expect them to contribute but when they want to give back that helps us, it tells us we are on the right path.”

In addition to practical and academic help, the centre is a hive of extramural activity. The performing arts section is a big part not only of the children’s lives but in fundraising initiatives. Before Covid-19 a few staff would visit the US every second year with about a dozen kids to put on performances to help raise funds. They have also been frequently to China, Thailand, Germany and France.

And then there is sport. “We have five male soccer teams that play under the Eldorado Park Football Association,” says Madondo. “We also have one ladies’ football team and a netball team, and we have a swimming team but unfortunately that has not been operational since lockdown.”

The centre itself did not close during lockdown, however.

“In Kliptown, children are better off being at school rather than in the community where there are no safety precautions observed. We had to keep feeding these kids and keep educating them — there’s no way children around here could learn online except at KYP — so we decided to keep our holiday programme running because that was the only way to put the children into a safe space,” Madondo says.

“I think one of the problems with our leaders is they take solutions from Europe and the US thinking that they will work in SA. Isolating in our community is almost impossible. People are using a communal tap and a communal toilet. Some homes around here are just a small one-roomed shack with six or seven people living in it. There’s no way you can all just sit in there the whole day, there’s not enough ventilation, never mind anything else.”

Madondo laughs at the idea of any authority challenging KYP’s decision to stay open. “When the kids are here, no-one is drunk, everyone is wearing a mask, everyone knows they need to do social distancing and everyone knows they need to learn. A person would have to be mentally challenged to question why we are doing this.”

To address additional economic pressure caused by lockdown and resulting job losses, KYP has stretched its budget.

“We gave monthly groceries to about 500 families for eight months last year. Our members always get two meals a day but since lockdown we have also been offering a hot meal to anyone from the community every Friday. We do our best to close whatever gaps we can without diverting from our mandate of educating the kids.”

That education is not only academic. “It’s about teaching our young people to be hungry for success, to show them how things work, what the world expects from them and what they can expect from the world,” says Madondo.

The centre employs two social workers who help with various facets of psychosocial wellbeing, from helping children without birth certificates to get their citizenship documents, to dealing with depression and family problems. They also partner with institutions such as the University of Johannesburg and Wits University, whose educational psychologists help with assessments.

Perhaps the most important part of this many-layered organisation is vocational development. “Our main goal is to help our young people become economically active,” Madondo says. “Not all of us can be academics. There’s nothing wrong with going to a trade school instead of university, but here, too, there are barriers. We currently have three KYP members doing plumbing apprenticeships but a course costs about R18,000 for three months, which makes it impossible for most young people to do.

“And becoming a qualified motor mechanic requires a certain pass mark in maths, so a young person who may not be academically strong but is really good at fixing cars will never have the opportunity to become a professional mechanic.

“The trade industries need to reconsider these things. We also need to convince more donors to fund those expensive trade courses. It’s very rare to find people interested in this kind of funding; everyone wants to fund university careers.”

The professionals who give talks at KYP range from business moguls to carpenters.

“For last week’s Motivational Wednesday we had one of our alumni who is now a civil engineer. He came in his boots and work clothes. It’s good for kids to see that success is not always about suits and ties.”

Vocational guidance is coupled with a work-readiness programme. “This helps young people to know which jobs exist, what they need to do to get those jobs, and how to keep those jobs.

“We also help with transportation fare when they start a job. You often find that young people are already owing loan sharks because they had to borrow money to make it to work in their first month. So we intervene to make sure they don’t have those debts before even getting their first pay cheque.”A common thread running through everything at KYP is the desire to create a society that is not only economically productive but nonviolent.

“In every area, we encourage our members and everybody involved to be nice, to be kind. It is a challenge. We have a system in which we help kids to become good citizens but then we find out that those kids, if they do something wrong at home, are insulted or even slapped by their parents.

“Sometimes there are kids who don’t want to leave the centre when it’s time to go home, because here you are being cared for and then when you think of where you are going … maybe you are in trouble, maybe you even end up running away and living on the streets. We have seen this happen.

“We engage with the parents through our parents’ meetings and the attendance is very encouraging — at least 80% of parents attend. We give them an update on the programme but it is also an opportunity for us to share with them how kids need to be cared for and how much parents also need to play their role.

“Here we constantly remind the kids how important they are and how special they are. That’s what they need to hear, all the time.

“People can be quick to judge but slow to help. No-one enjoys living in poverty. No-one wishes to be struggling. We all want good lives. The question is how to bring that about.” Visit kliptownyouthprogram.org.za

Kliptown inspiration

Kliptown, established in 1903, is the oldest township in Soweto and the place where the Freedom Charter was adopted in 1955. It has a population of more than 40,000 but lacks all basic amenities.

“Kliptown’s history inspired us,” says Thulani Madondo, co-founder and executive director of the Kliptown Youth Program, “but when you look at how the community has been neglected, that touched us. We wanted to be the generation that could break the poverty cycle.”