South African Ideas Festival: Money Matters

Founding History: Since 2011, the Bezos Scholars Program has cultivated a special and committed partnership with the African Leadership Academy (ALA). Every year, ALA collaborates with our program to select five students and one educator who are tasked with planning the annual South African Ideas Festival (SAIF). SAIF is an entrepreneurial development festival where youth convene to discuss, learn and design innovative ways to spark change in their community using social entrepreneurship.

Project Theme: Financial literacy

Target Audience & Location: 17–21-year-old African entrepreneurs and business owners located in various regions across Africa. The ALA Scholar team is based in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Vision: A prosperous Africa driven by a network of young African Entrepreneurs

Mission: To host a virtual festival developing a network of young African entrepreneurs by equipping them with financial skills to maintain and grow sustainable and successful businesses.

Project Description: Scholars Michael Olivier, Momo Elfaisal Ahmed, Taha Khorchani, Rehema Bogita, Wazzy Mwambene and their educator Scholar Natalia Sikombe, will host a virtual festival in collaboration with a team of 15 student interns. This year the festival theme is “Money Matters” because the team’s research illuminated that young entrepreneurs needed and wanted to increase their knowledge and skills in the fundamentals of business finance.

They launched a promotional campaign and opened applications to encourage and engage young people from their target audience to apply. They aim to select 30 participants who are operating 30 start-ups and will engage them in 25+ hours of virtual programming over the course of two weeks at the end of February. To prepare, they are working on building out their own curriculum, with support from ALA. They are also engaging trained virtual facilitators while planning to use interactive tools and activities to connect their participants virtually, across their various locations. Some of the topics they will cover during the festival include fundraising, pitching, bookkeeping, budgeting, constructing a financial plan, market research and more. The festival will culminate with a few standout participants winning cash prizes that will go toward their business.