ESG News South Africa

Support South African volunteer for international prize

Keith Wimble, a Vodacom Change the World volunteer at Ikamva Labantu, is one of only two South African participants to be nominated for the Grahame Maher Award, an annual international prize given to the programme's most inspirational leader.
Keith Wimble
Keith Wimble

The winner will receive a £100,000 (approximately R1.2 million) grant, to be used over 12 months to implement a visionary project for his or her charity. The challenge is that voting can only take place via Facebook over a two-week period and voting closes Friday 21 October 2011.

Wimble has worked tirelessly with the Cape Town-based NGO to provide health care services to the community of Khayelitsha - educating community members, inspecting facilities, training staff and forming relationships with healthcare portfolio holders in local government.

"Environment supportive of good health"

"To ensure that the community is living in an environment supportive of good health, I would utilise the money to facilitate the lifting of living standards to acceptable levels," says Wimble. "We hope to achieve this through the provision of health education to community members, informing the community of their rights to health as well as to the effective delivery of all services from local and provincial government and proactively addressing processes to ensure that preventative health measures are in place."

The NGO is a non-profit organisation assisting and empowering vulnerable families and communities in township areas. The organisation traces its roots back to the 1960s and the apartheid era when Helen Lieberman and other community activists started working on addressing the severe lack of services and support for black communities. Today, it touches the lives of more than 25 000 people every day including over 1000 children in 300 foster homes; more than 12 000 pre-school children in 200 under-developed day-care centres and about 540 senior citizens in 17 seniors clubs.

Vote for him on Facebook.

Let's do Biz