The Bulungula Incubator: Creating vibrant and sustainable rural communities

The Bulungula Incubator Team (photo taken from their website)

This week’s Womxn of the Week is Réjane Woodroffe, the director and co-founder of The Bulungula Incubator (see website here).  The Bulungula Incubator is a rural development NGO located in the Eastern Cape with a mission to create sustainable, vibrant rural communities through partnering with them, as well as through introducing external technologies and knowledge that can help people live much happier lives, without undermining local traditions and culture.  Their primary areas of focus are education, health and nutrition, sustainable livelihoods, and basic services.  This organisation utilizes an integrated approach to development in the area, with the consent and request of the community; it is a catalyst through which the communities take ownership of their own lives and implement change.  Réjane has kindly spoken a bit more about its beginnings and her involvement with the NGO, the work that they do, and how you can get involved.

A bit about Réjane and the Bulungula Incubator

I was born in 1974 in the Cape Flats in Cape Town, in the Lotus River/Grassy Park area. My family had been forcibly removed from District Six and relocated to the Cape Flats. I attended High School at South Peninsula High, where I was Chairperson of the SRC in 1987 and 1988 and part of the Western Cape COSAS Student movement which was affiliated to the UDF. I was active in the anti-apartheid struggle throughout my school-going years. It was gratifying to be able to see Nelson Mandela walk out of prison, be present for his first public speech at the Grand Parade, see the ANC un-banded and be old enough to vote in the first democratic elections. I proceeded to study Business Science (majoring in Economics) at UCT. In 1997, as I was completing my time at UCT I began to apply to study a Masters in Development but (unbeknownst to me), I had been selected by a professor for recommendation to an Assistant Economist position at the investment bank, Merrill Lynch. While it was by no means a dream to become part of the finance world, I needed to make money, I had no family resources to rely on and I had a student loan to sort out. So I thought, “Take the job, save some cash and then study Development.”

Of course years went by and my career grew, I went on to become the Chief Economist at Metropolitan Asset Managers, my second employer after Merrill Lynch.  However, I was becoming increasingly unhappy and wanted to get back to the business of community development and work. I had done some of this while working in finance, as a volunteer counsellor at Rape Crisis and the Trust for Community Outreach and Education (TCOE), but I wanted to go back to development full time.  I then applied for, and received, a scholarship to attend the University of Sussex in the UK to complete a Masters Degree in Development Economics in 2004. It was also the year that I met the person who was to become my husband, David Martin. Dave coincidentally had also studied Business Science at UCT but we hadn’t known each other then. He had searched for a community in which to do development work combined with tourism and travel (something he’d fallen in love with during an 18 month trip from Cape Town to London on public transport, walking across the Congo forests.. a tale in itself!).  So, once he’d returned from London, he took two weeks to walk from Kei Mouth on the east coast to Port Edward (essentially the length of the Wild Coast) and found Bulungula.  

By Easter 2004, when we’d met through a mutual friend, he had just received permission to build the Bulungula Lodge in partnership with the local community.  He used savings from a stint he’d done in London programming computers during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s.  At that time I was still working full time for Metropolitan Asset Managers and making plans to take a year-long sabbatical in the September of 2004 to embark upon the Masters in Development Economics as planned. We stayed in touch – he beginning with the Bulungula Lodge (that was to become our first successful community project in the area) and me completing my studies. I returned in September 2005 and we promptly got married.  Metropolitan then offered to allow me to work alternate weeks from home so that I could travel to or from Bulungula every weekend.  With no roads and only a 4x4 track to the village, and flights to Mthatha only via Johannesburg, it was a 12 hour trip one way – I had a one day weekend for the 3 years I commuted this way. The Bulungula Lodge was becoming a success as a community upliftment programme, but we felt that we needed to do more.  Although the Bulungula Lodge was earning money for community members and providing jobs to half of the households in the area, there was a chronic lack of necessary services: no roads, no access to healthcare, no ambulances – ever, no functioning school, no portable water, no sanitation, no electricity.  In 2004/2005 a third of the babies in the village died from diarrhea due to lack of access to clean water. We have since done a survey and found that 53% of households have lost at least one child to diarrhea, and 1 in 9 have lost 3 or more.  We have since completely eradicated this problem. The local government school, a mud structure, had collapsed and we wanted to begin helping with at least these two issues.  We then launched an NGO: the Bulungula Incubator on 1 March 2007. The Bulungula Lodge was a community project, but it was a business entity and therefore not suitable for fundraising for water and education projects. The organisation has grown significantly from there in the past 11 years with the mission to be a catalyst in the creation of vibrant and sustainable rural communities.

The Bulungula Incubator aims to address the challenges of rural poverty.  We design and test the implementation of good rural developmental ideas that contributes to the creation of prosperous and sustainable rural communities. Our programmes have grown to cover a spectrum of interventions in Education, Health, and Sustainable Livelihoods: in partnership with our community, local government and traditional leadership through our ‘Conception to Career’ programme from health in pregnancy through to the support needed in the vocational stage.  We work with the community of the Xhora Mouth Administrative Area which is based in the Mbhashe municipality on the Wild Coast of the Eastern Cape.  In the last Statistics South Africa (StatsSA) census, the Mbhashe municipality was found to be the poorest in the country. Dave and I continued to build the work of the Bulungula Incubator while still working in our other full time jobs: him at the Bulungula Lodge and me at Metropolitan Assets Managers.  In 2009, I left the finance industry for good and became the full time director of the Bulungula Incubator.

Hopes for the Bulungula Incubator

Our goal continues to be the development of good rural development projects across the spectrum: Pre-conception to Career with our local community who are involved in all aspects of our work. We also actively partner other organisations, governments, foundations and individuals to increase the scaling and broader impact of our work.  Although Dave and I are both from Cape Town originally, Bulungula is our permanent home and, for as long as the community will have us, we will continue to live here as community members. There is so much to do in this sector of development that there will always be something useful (and interesting) for us to do, until our dying days.  An integral part of our work is to build the long term sustainability of the organisation.  Of the 120 employees of the organisation, only a handful are not from the local community; and only because they have skills that we need that are not yet available locally.  Wherever possible people from the local community are trained to be able to do jobs at all levels of the organisation – even in an area where the access to education is one of the most challenging in the country, we have had notable successes in this regard. It is my job to work myself out of the job as Director of the organization, and to build its long term financial sustainability – we are certainly getting there. My hope for the Bulungula Incubator is for it to achieve its mission as a catalyst in the creation of vibrant and sustainable rural communities, and for it to do with as a wholly run and led community organisation.  

How people can get involved

We accept donations of course - cash and in kind. But also by sharing their time and skills, both on site and remotely. If anyone would like to come and stay and help, we prefer stays of at least one year as it takes time to get into the rhythm of life and actually make a difference.  However, there are many skills and pieces of work that can be contributed remotely.  The best would be to contact me and see how we can match your skills with our various projects.

Watch a short video here, here or here to see some of the incredible work that they are doing.

Get hold of them at the following numbers:

Landline: 047 577 8908

Cell phone: 083 395 1691

Fax: 086 527 8277

Books of the Week 3

Educated by Tara Westover

(by Amy Bunce)

I could not put this book down. It was an eye-opening story about a world so vastly different from the one in which I grew up. Tara Westover writes about her own life growing up in a house of survivalist Mormons in Idaho. She is one of seven children. Her mother is a herbalist and a midwife. Her father owns a scrapyard. Westover’s parents had no belief in the Government nor did they register any of their seven children. Westover registered herself at the age of nine. Her father’s survivalist beliefs meant no doctors, modern medicine or hospitals. Despite some of the horrific accidents recounted by Westover from the scrapyard, all ailments were treated by her mother at home. Westover’s father had the family prepared for the “End of Days” by stockpiling food and keeping emergency bags under their beds. She paints a picture of an unusual, and at times disturbing, family dynamic influenced by her strong-willed and dogmatic father.

At the age of seventeen Westover decides to pursue an education. She takes on this challenge having never been exposed to any formal education, let alone a classroom. She grapples with balancing the obligations she had to her family and the obligations she has to herself. As her determination to pursue education becomes stronger, so her understanding of the world grows and she has to deal with “coming to terms with the depth of her [your] own ignorance” (see interview here). I am in awe of what Westover lived through and how far she has come against unusual odds. She writes with complete transparency and respect for the faith and people who raised her. She explores the role that education plays in our lives and how it informs the way we make decisions in our lives. It struck me how easily education can be taken for granted by those who are privileged enough to receive it and how our understanding of the world is sometimes so much bigger than we think.

P.S. If you do enjoy this, The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls is worth a read too.

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

A friend of mine recommended this collection of short stories by Carmen Maria Machado to me when I was having a reading slump.  I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it as this is not typically my go-to genre of book.  Machado blends genres in this collection in order to create her own of fantasy, horror, romance and science fiction.  Her stories all have an overarching theme; the everyday violences that women encounter.  My favourite story was the first one in the book, The Husband Stitch- which is based on the children’s tale The Green Ribbon and holds an eclectic array of ghost stories and tales throughout it, all the while describing the relationship of a husband and wife, and his never being satisfied until he can uncover what’s under her ribbon. As I enjoyed the first story so much, the rest all fell flat for me; however from reviews that I have read online, everyone seemed to have a different favourite story. The novella in the centre of the book based on episodes of Law and Order: SVU felt too long and complicated, however I’m glad that I pushed through and finished it. I’ve felt that all of the stories have haunted and stuck with me for much longer than I thought they would, and it was great to branch out of my comfort zone in terms of new genres and different writing styles. I would definitely recommend this if you are looking for something different or subversive.