Nicola Steyn
Nominee's Province:
Western Cape
Project Name/Description:
CEO: Adult Education Institute
“She is a woman, daily, striving to change the world through student’s life at the time. A true inspiration.”
These are the words those close to Steyn have used to describe her – and they are factually correct as Steyn has worked wonders over the years, and she has no intention of stopping.
Steyn owns the Adult Education Institute, a distance-learning college in Cape Town, that started in 2022. It focuses on offering affordable and accessible education for the forgotten lower-level workers and school leavers. She aims to make sure every South African can have access to education.
The mission is to further make accredited education accessible to the middle to the lower income market, mostly to women, in rural areas.
As she runs her college, Steyn launched a Basic Farming Bursary Programme, awarding bursaries to twenty women annually across South Africa to help them learn basic skills in farming and entrepreneurship, enabling and empowering them to start small businesses and change whole communities.
Steyn has indicated that she has plans to start doing generational trauma and entrepreneurship workshops in the Cape Flats – realising her dream to get down to the root of our community’s problems and help them heal from the poverty circle.
With personal losses such as losing her two brothers to crime, one would have thought Steyn should by now have given up, but not this resilient woman.
Steyn concludes: “Knowledge is the seed of change, and when planted in the hearts of women, it grows into a forest of possibilities.”
