Africa!Ignite

General information

Our Vision

Our vision is a self-reliant Africa alight with energy and innovation.
Our purpose is to create partnerships with rural and marginalised communities to facilitate their fair participation in the economy and society, and to help make their voices heard.

Our history
Africa!Ignite was established in 2004 by MiET Africa, a leading Southern African education development agency based in KwaZulu-Natal; to pursue community development work complementary to MiET Africa’s focus on schools and formal education.

Rural development leadership
Africa!Ignite’s access to a unique footprint of 120 development nodes across KwaZulu-Natal and our team’s extensive experience of working in rural areas over more than a decade have helped us to establish leadership in rural development.

We provide extensive enterprise-development support to hundreds of youths and adults; particularly women, across KwaZulu-Natal’s rural areas. We support:

•Rural crafters (about 1 000, mostly women of whom the majority are mothers and grandmothers),
•Rural research field workers (about 40),
•Newspaper correspondents and story-tellers (20),
•Water and sanitation outreach workers (120) and local historians/tour guides,
•Rural retail entrepreneurs and tourist guides

Africa!Ignite has paid more than R16 million to rural entrepreneurs since 2008, and in the past two years paid R2 million to rural women crafters.

We also have extensive experience in communication and creative story-telling. We help communities, adults and children to tell their own stories and showcase these stories through different creative media.

Some clear development principles underpin our work:
•We believe in genuine partnerships. We value the funding, investment and support partners who enable us to achieve our purpose; as well as our rural beneficiary partners who welcome us into their communities and who partner with us in igniting potential. We seek to nurture all these partnerships.

•We believe in the people of our continent, our country and our province. Our aim is to help them to reach their potential, so that they can ignite the continent’s energy, creativity and economic power.

•We do not believe in handouts. We salute those agencies who help those who cannot help themselves. Our purpose; however, is to create opportunities and remove obstacles for individuals and groups in rural and marginalised areas who have the will and the drive to help themselves and their communities.