What is the Bulungula Incubator? June 28, 2007

We started the Bulungula Lodge (http://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.

The Bulungula Incubator idea draws some inspiration from the notorious dotcom era in the last 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 an innovative agent in the creation of vibrant, sustainable, rural communities.

We aim to achieve this through partnering with the Nqileni community, other NGO’s and innovative thinkers to find synergies between the traditional rural African lifestyle and culture, and external technologies and innovations.

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We’ve started a number of great projects with the help of some awesome volunteers. 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 blog.

This blog will continue to record the general activites of the BI and link through to all the existing and new project blogs. The individual projects are summarised below. Click on the relevant Project at the top right of this page to see the latest news on these projects.

Rehabilitating No-ofisi School

Our local school is in crisis. The building has collapsed, the teachers teach for 3 days a week at best (only 5 days taught in October), there is no food, furniture, books, toilets, water and the average attendance is only 40%. In short it is completely disfunctional. 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

 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 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. These project reports will be uploaded here shortly - they will appear as “nursery” under the Projects heading on the top right. 

 

To see all our latest blog posts for the Bulungula Incubator, just click on one of the Projects listed at the top of this page on the right.

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.