Today we had a workshop with the two leaders of iNeSI (Ikamva National eSkills Institute), the organisation that we are working with. We all presented ourselves and our backgrounds. iNeSI stressed the importance of our mission for the future of South-Africa at a time when the country has to start making the shift to an ‘e-litterate society’, i.e. the people and businesses have to use the power of IT to make people’s lives better and to address the high youth unemployment. According to the World Economic Forum SA ranks last out of 148 countries in the ‘math and scienc’e ranking and although the score is contested everyone agrees that there is a lot of work to do. IneSI challenges us to be bold, to not limit ourselves to what already is, to ‘remove the box and think’.

After lunch we went to the local weekly arts&crafts market so V could get some African masks. She is clearly a master negotiator because she drove the price so much down that the seller had to fetch his boss for approval (although I’m pretty sure they still made a profit).

We went back to the meeting room in the hotel and worked intensively on our project plan for the next weeks. ‘We’ in this case being the four people in team two. There are four subteams, each has a different but related statement of work. Ours centers around the establishment of a new CoLab (collaborative laboratory) in the North-West province. Think of it as a center of excellence around a specific theme. We made good progress although we are still not quite ready for the big session planned for Tuesday.

Tomorrow we travel to Mafeking in the North-West province. It will be our base for the next three weeks. Tomorrow, June 16th, is also a national holiday in SA to commemorate the death of Hector Pieterson and many others who protested apartheid in 1976.

Today started with a session at the IBM South-Africa headquarters. With our team’s diverse backgrounds it looked like a mini United Nations session 🙂 We were briefed by the country general manager on the specific business context like the black economic empowerment act. The goal of this act is to promote the hiring of people from previously disadvantaged communities. Over time the composition of companies should represent the population distribution in the country and SA should be master of its own destiny.

Second stop was the Apartheid Museum which was a real eye opener for me. To see everything you would need at least three hours, we had to rush it just a bit but it was well worth the time. I knew of course what apartheid was in a broad sense but the exibition really brought home the horrors of that period. What struck me were the movies of the politicians that started apartheid and how they justified their actions as being for the greater good, i.e. ‘see how we are helping these helpless black people’. It had, of course, nothing to do with protecting their self interest… The struggle that Nelson Mandela went through and the perseverance he showed to SA and to the world are hard to describe. However, through many historical documents, pictures and video’s the museum does give a sense of what happened. I now understand a little bit better of what Mandela went through and one cannot but have enormous admiration for this amazing leader.

For dinner we went to a nice Indian restaurant and had a suberb meal together with the two main sponsors of our project. Tomorrow morning we start the first working session so now is the time for some final preparation…