Palesa Ntsoti

Youth in Business and Entrepreneurship

Nominee's Province:
Gauteng

Age:
31

Project Name/Description:
Faded Black Innovations

More info:
https://www.facebook.com/palesa.ntsoti.3

Palesa Ntsoti, 31, is the founder of Faded Black Innovations, an NPO that specialises in transforming traditional NPOs to social enterprises by expanding their capacity to achieve efficiency, sustainability and effectiveness in communities. The organisation, whose vision is of a society that combines economic activity with community benefit and a society led by dynamic social entrepreneurs, is based in Westonaria, west of Johannesburg. “Our approach is based on participative experiential learning through our social entrepreneurship workshops and Accelerator programme. My inspiration to start the NPO came from an observation that NPOs generally struggle to get funding or are unable to create other income streams,” says Ntsoti. She says traditional NPO’s in townships are not adequately prepared for the changing CSI world since for far too long they relied on philanthropy and largesse of corporates. “We are training them to be social enterprises, so that they can be self-sustainable and create more impact to their beneficiaries,” she says. Faded Black Innovations, which employs five people, conducts workshops on social entrepreneurship, trains young people in community engagement and community resource mobilisation. The overriding of Faded Black Innovations is this: if jobs are created in low-income areas, personal well-being will increase and the quality of life in those neighbourhoods will improve.