Your Singazenzela Invitation

Join with the founding partners to develop Singazenzela as a loosely coupled, geographically dispersed network of networks that continues to work across national boundaries. Singa can ensure that wherever they move (or are moved) young Africans can pick up the thread and rediscover their digital assets.

The Singazenzela partnership views the current changes being experienced in global financial markets as an opportunity for companies to review their market and investment strategies from economic and social impact perspectives and to reassess their impact priorities.

Working together we can combine 'Development through Enterprise', 'Technical Innovation' and 'Thought Leadership' to enable the most vulnerable African Youth to handle whatever life throws at them. We will:

• Target the most vulnerable and hard to reach in Africa
• Nurture more resilient children and young people
• Enable rights based service discovery

To build Singazenzela into a public / private partnership able to deliver across Africa:

• Sustainable systemic change impacting 500,000 children and the youth in the immediate future (and over one million in 2-3 years)
• Proactive service discovery to replace passive service delivery
• Able to begin the work even in extremis (natural disasters, refugee camps, low level conflicts, failing infrastructures)
• Personal journeys of discovery; finding life skills, services & products

To find your role within the Partnership

The Singazenzela Initiative is designed to be a collaborative effort involving many diverse organizations including:

• Funding Partners – Offering Public and Civil Society Development finance 
• Management Partners – Blending a Coherent Pan-African Strategy with the Local Country Conditions and Opportunities
• Content Partners – Providing media, old, blended and new, designed to empower children and young people
• Service Partners – Delivering innovative life services with Singa as a natural complement to their existing channels
• Technology Partners – Providing the networks, channels and platforms

Help us make the preparations for Four Country Pilots in 2010

To talk to us about how you can help make Singa will work on the ground

It all starts with intriguing physical and digital puzzles, clues, collectibles, downloadables etc. which, are carefully placed where the most vulnerable will „stumble across‟ them in the real world. Each is a self-contained, engaging learning experience and aims to build the player‟s resilience in some way. But all point towards Singazenzela as well! As groups of challenges are mastered, the child gently becomes imperceptibly immersed in the Singazenzela Experience – until the quest to find out more becomes the challenge and leads them on!

Singazenzela works in extremis. The intention to is engage vulnerable children and young people when they are at the extreme edges of provision: wherever a white food sack is dropped from a plane or wherever a plastic sheet (tarp) is offered as the only form of shelter. In such settings, Singazenzela works with International Agencies to place an intriguing visual clue on a sack or a tarp: one that the children spot elsewhere in the camp, then again in the Spaza or a local tuck shop, then again, in the village or township and then on the TV or billboard. Following the challenges over time and space helps individuals to accumulate a basic understanding of the Singazenzela characters and iconography.

Over time, mastering apparently random challenges gives way to a sense of curiosity about what Singazenzela is all about. Having learned the language of Singazenzela, children and young people start to consciously seek it out. There are many ways to fall into the Singazenzela Experience and many interesting and intriguing pathways to explore thereafter. Slowly, these children and young people come to understand Singazenzela‟s potential impact on their lives. Their challenge then becomes - a quest to make better use of Singazenzela and they start exploring all these possibilities!

When children and young people are ready, they make a conscious decision to make themselves known to Singazenzela. They are then able to customise and mould Singazenzela to make sense of the world around them and to focus on their own personal challenges. At the heart of Singazenzela they are able to create a personalised environment. Once they are here, everything works the way they want it to work and they are able to form a digital footprint. Their own version of Singazenzela will be accessible whenever they need it. Gradually, Singazenzela becomes the way to accumulate and store resources, knowledge and know-how – until the quest to make a better life becomes the challenge and leads them on!

Singazenzela Challenges are placed only where the target Singazenzela audience go. This enables Singazenzela to target its resources very accurately. The physical world is seeded with 2D and 3D objects, which can be found and collected. As the collections grow, so does a child‟s understanding. By working with the private sector, the partnership facilitates this dissemination on matchboxes, food packets and other everyday objects. Everything is 'accumulative', 'collectible‟, 'tradeable‟ and 'downloadable‟.  Giving youth access to basic 'knowledge and know-how‟ via a unique blend of physical comics, puzzles, games and appropriate networked services enhances individual resilience - the first step in unlocking the child‟s potential to tackle life events for themselves.