Ubunye program at the University of Cape Town

Established in 2007, Ubunye at the University of Cape Town is dedicated to providing educational advancement, opportunities for leadership and life-skills development, and mentorship and guidance to motivated high school students in Cape Town. It was established by the directors of three student-run organizations that had similar needs and development aims: Inkanyezi (mentorship, career guidance, and life skills), TeachOut (academic support) and the Township Debating League (debating training and development debating tournaments). Shortly after Ubunye was established, the Media School (journalism, photography, and radio) joined Ubunye as the fourth project.  For several years these projects had been operating independently, while informally collaborating on some group activities. Ubunye acts as an umbrella organization to facilitate better coordination of such collaboration.
Ubunye’s projects fulfill a variety of needs through various after-school activities with students in township schools. Inkanyezi’s goal is to improve the post-school prospects for its students through mentorship and career guidance, and facilitating applications for tertiary studies. TeachOut aims to improve the academic performance of township students by providing academic tutoring in English, Functional English, Mathematics, Science and Accounting. The Township Debating League trains students in debating and critical thinking and organizes a development debating league with more than 20 underprivileged schools taking part in tournaments.  The Media School runs classes in writing, radio and photographic journalism and organizes school newspapers, providing a creative outlet for students in activities not provided by their vastly under-resourced township schools.

Ubunye provides support and insures accountability to its four projects. While the projects maintain a high degree of independence, Ubunye supports them by dealing with any joint administrative work and joint events. It releases the burden off the directors of the projects so that they can focus on improving their projects’ operations. Accountability is achieved by having the projects report to Ubunye and to each other. This makes the directors of each project share ideas and support one another. All of the project directors have found this invaluable in improving the operations of their projects.

Ubunye is an entirely student-run organization. Although some university staff and community partners are on the board, their main contributions are guidance and the provision of added accountability. All of the day-to-day operations are managed by students, who voluntarily take on responsibilities on top of the normal academic workload.

Ubunye has gained much needed support from the university, and has been recognized as one of the main development organizations at the University of Cape Town. Each year Ubunye’s projects have 120-220 active volunteers, whom work with approximately 400 to 600 students from disadvantaged schools.