What is the Bulungula Incubator? June 28, 2007

We started the Bulungula Lodge (www.bulungula.com) in one of the poorest, most remote villages in South Africa in order to see whether backpacker tourism could be used as an effective poverty-fighting tool. Our village, called Nqileni (the “q” is a click sound), has no road, school, running water, toilets, school, clinic, electricity… It’s beautiful place though with a wonderful, warm community living a traditional way of life which has changed little over the centuries.

The lodge has been a big success and has created jobs for over 35 people in the village through working at the lodge directly and through the community-owned and run business we helped start (horse-riding, canoeing, veggie farming, etc.).As the Bulungula Lodge began starting more and more community development projects, we realised that it was necessary to start a dedicated organisation which would focus solely on community development work and be separate from the lodge business.

 

Nqileni village

The Bulungula Incubator idea draws some inspiration from the notorious dotcom era in the late 90’s when Incubator companies were formed to assist new internet entrepreneurs to create brilliant new internet businesses without having to waste their valuable energy on doing the boring work of securing finance, setting up offices, employing secretaries, getting legal, etc… The idea was for the Incubator to give them all the necessary tools to go out and create a magic business… Of course a lot of these businesses turned out to be a load of crap and vanished after the dotcom crash.The idea with the Bulungula Incubator (BI) was that having lived in this community for many years and having worked through all the usual complications involved with development projects in communities like ours, we now had the social infrastructure in place to allow other people to come implement their brilliant rural development ideas. Many development projects which are conceptually brilliant fail because the innovator underestimated the difficulty in trying new things in very remote, traditional comunities. The history of devlopment work in Africa is littered with failed projects that got hijacked by local elites, didn’t take into account local beliefs and customs or were just introduced to the communities in the wrong way. We at the BI have been through all of this and have established a constructive, positive working relationship with our community and thus we can introduce new ideas or projects without having to worry that it will fail due to some unexpected community dynamic.

Ok, time for a bit of the more formal stuff:

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The Bulungula Incubator is a non-profit organisation which aims to incubate brilliant rural development projects. Our vision is:

To be a catalyst for the creation of vibrant and sustainable rural communities.

In partnership with our community, government, NGO’s and other innovative thinkers, the Bulungula Incubator aims to achieve our vision through finding synergies between the traditional rural African lifestyle and culture, and external technologies and innovations. These synergies must always seek to enhance the positive aspects of traditional rural life and/or mitigate the problematic aspects in accordance with our values and recognising the fundamental human rights enshrined in our constitution. The Bulungula Incubator also aims to be an agent for change by influencing government and corporate policy in an effort to spread our vision more widely.

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We’ve started a number of great projects with the help of some awesome volunteers and co-workers. The idea is for each of these projects to get their own blog where the volunteers can blog their progress for the benefit of the great people who donated their hard-earned cash, old Bulungula Lodge guests, community development workers and you random blog browsers who have been so (un)fortunate to stumble upon this website.

This page you’re on now will remain fairly static and will just give a summary of the projects currently being run. Please click on the relevant projects at the top right of this page to see the latest news and developments.

The Bulungula Incubator has four main focus areas with projects running under each, these are:
Focus Area 1: Education

We are busy with two large projects here namely: the rehabilitation of our local No-Ofisi Primary School as well as the creation in Feb 2009 of the Jujurha Early Learning Centre

Rehabilitating No-ofisi School

Our local school is in crisis. The building collapsed 3 years ago, the teachers only came to work on average 3 days a week at best (only 5 days taught in October 2007), there was no food, furniture, books, toilets, water and the average attendance is only 40%. In short it was and still is completely dysfunctional. Here’s a photo of our school as it is was when we started complete with see-through walls! It is now a tin shack, and we are working towards a full-scale new eco-school. Click on Crisis School Rehabilitation at the top of this page on the right to see how we’re tackling this problem.

We’re fundraising hard for this project. The barometer below shows how our fundraising is going for phase one of the building of the new school

 

Focus Area 2: Health and Nutrition

School Food Forest

We are building a fantastic permaculture food forest at No-ofisi School which will provide nutritious fruit and veg to the school children all year round. Click on School Food Forest under the projects drop down menu at the top of the page on the right for the latest news.

Kids’ Farming Competition

The idea here was to encourage kids to take up organic farming by holding a competition where about 100 kids were each given loads of veggie seedlings and the kids with the best veggie gardens after 3 months won great prizes. This project was a huge success and is going to become a regular event in the village. Click on kids’ farming competition at the top of this page on the right to read all about this brilliant little project. Here’s a photo of Zintle, one of the winners, in her garden:

Bulungula Seedling Nursery

The aim of this project was to build a vegetable seedling nursery that would be owned and run by one of the woman in the village. Farming in our area has been severely hampered by the lack of supply of veggie seedlings – the nearest place to buy them was 6 hours of hard expensive travelling away. This project has been a great success – thanks to the fantastic donation by Katy and the hard volunteering of Craigo.

Nyankala Vegetable Garden

Using a mixture of community profits from the lodge and later a generous donation from old Mutual a stunning irrigated vegetable garden was created which is owned and run by Nothembile. This garden supplies the lodge restaurant as well as surrounding villages with most of their vegetable needs earning a great income for Nothembile and ensuring ultra-nutritious, tasty food is aways available.

Nyankala Garden

Focus Area 3: Micro-enterprise Development

One of our earliest and most important objectives was to help people start their own businesses in recognition of the fact that true empowerment doesn’t come through employment but rather through being in charge of your own business, your own livelihood and thus your own life.

We have successfully started 13 community-owned small businesses in the village that employ 25 people in the village. Most of these businesses are linked to Bulungula Lodge and include horse-riding, canoeing, a pancake restaurant, herbalist forest tours, a massage parlour, laundry, etc.  In addition to this we have commissioned a study into 10 new potential businesses, most of which should not be linked to tourism but rather to the domestic village economy. Click on Micro-enterprise Development for info on this research.

The Lemongrass and Essential Oils Cluster

In February 2009 this very exciting project is to be launched. Funded by Old Mutual, this project will help people grow significant quantities of lemongrass for which we have a confirmed order of 5 tons per year. This is a high value crop and has the potential to revolutionise the community’s income stream. Later this project will expand to include other crops that can be used in Essential Oils. Click on Essential Oils under the projects menu for the research and site visits that have already been completed.

Focus Area 4: Basic Services

Our community represent Ground Zero in terms of government services. To date there is not a single government municipal service available in our region. No taps, toilets, clinic, road, electricity, telephone…

A number of interventions have been initiated around innovative ways of providing these services including the installation of rainwater tanks, underground spring protection and the use of wind turbines to provide electricity. These project reports will be uploaded at the end of November 2008.

To see all our latest blog posts for the Bulungula Incubator, just click on All Projects under the projects menu or alternatively at the very top of the page there is a listing of the last 10 blog updates from various projects.

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NOTE: in keeping with the latest internet trends, we’ve designed this page as a blog. For those who don’t know blogs, the most recent posts (like a diary entry) appear at the top. So if you’re reading about these projects for the first time, click on the relevant Project at the top right and then start reading upwards from the 1st post at the bottom. The most recent post will appear on the very top.

You’re welcome to leave a comment on any of the blog posts. Just click on “comment” which appears below each of the blog posts and leave your message.