mathabiso chamane

What does your company do?

Women Navigating the Future Network started in 2016, the idea was to serve our communities by creating a network that can use its financial muscles and professional skills to drive change. We believe that if we empower women and equip them to be drivers of change we will achieve a lot including equality goals and economic transformation. The organization has since grown and in 2019 it was formally registered as a not for-profit company with a refined strategy. The WNFN office in Mpumalanga was established in 2019 together with our working partner Okuhle Care Centre in KwaZulu Natal Newcastle championing all our social Impact projects. To strengthen its governance the network has an Advisory board that advises the executives on strategic matters and represents Women Navigating the Future Network as goodwill ambassadors in the wider community and other networks. WNFNETWORK has footprints in KWAZULU NATAL, LIMPOPO, and MPUMALANGA where it currently supports social impact projects,advocating for women empowerment and driving change.

What is your biggest success?

There's so many milestones we have achieved as an organisation, there's for I will mention few, we are an organization that always strive to drive visible change. Our main projects which I believe they've allowed us to drive change is our social impacts projects through two NGO Okuhle Care Centre for children with disability in KZN and Nomkhubulwane Cultural Group in Mpumalanga. Through Okuhle we cater for children who live with disabilities who has completed school phase but unemployed and those that not didnt completed main stream phase. We offer skills like sawing, baking and farming in partnership with local FET college, last year our first group were awarded with different skills certificate. We empower these young adults to be able to start their own businesses. We also offer awareness workshop to communities so that they are able to accept them as active participants in the community.Nomkhubulwane Cultural Group with high rate of teenage pregnancy we work with them to promote abstinence from sexual activities by teenagers, we host group coaching sessions, prayer sessions, sawing and beadmaking skills and farming projects which is done by mothers of these childrens/ youth. Through these projects we have created employments; sustainability of these NGOs and we have been able to feed families through farming project food security. Second Project launched last Year during 16 Days of Activism Against GBV is UThuleleni Project we call it a story of Hope where we as the Organisation we pledged to support victims during the stages of reporting, court attandence and recovering stage where we offer shelter, pyscological support and empower them through skill academy to create independence to sustain themselves The last one have led to us being selected as a Winning Story so one of our pillars is to create African Capital Fund which is a pillar to empower women through Financial inclusion in 2021 we activated the Pillar through Savings Club( Stokvel) we started with 12 members making small fee of contribution per month for a lock in period of three years meaning no withdrawal by members during this time; this doesn't not only teaches discipline but also teaches members from being a saver to being an investor. Members are allowed to embark on an investment journey to grow their money. We chose farming and the reason we chose farming is because we believe we can address three SDGoals being Zero hunger we provide Food security , Poverty We employee unemployed graduate and communities in our farms and Gender Equality Financial Inclusion, our story is unique because we not only focusing on making money for ourselves but on how can we use our money and drive change by impacting other peoples lives and we all win. We were therefore nominated by Stokfella as one of Winning Story.

What has been your biggest hurdle?

When we decided on farming we wanted to do it right and we adopted organic farming which is not easy and requires lots of rensilience. There were so many mistakes we made from planning and execution which led to us make 100% loss, we are proud though that we were able to create employment for some of our workers, we were able to feed some families and learn about the game of investment that it is a win or lose game and we have learnt our lessons to review and start again preparing our crops for next year harvest.