WHEN about a hundred poor matriculants approached 22-year-old Johnson Masango last year for IT training, he decided to expand his business to help bridge the digital divide in Nkomazi, one of the most underdeveloped communities in Mpumalanga.<\/p>\n
Today Masango, an entrant in the FNB\/Enablis Launchpad Competition, is expanding his small company, TM-Internet Solutions, by opening up an IT training school in downtown Johannesburg, while trying to raise sponsorships to train matriculants in Mpumalanga in basic computer literacy.<\/p>\n
Nkomazi is a few kilometres from the Swaziland border, where most people live on less than R10 a day. About 70 percent of those employed earn less than R1000 a month; 90 percent of the youth are unemployed and computer illiterate. <\/p>\n
They have no idea how to access computers. “This is a huge disadvantage when they are trying to find jobs, as most jobs require computer literacy. Also, they can’t afford computer literacy studies,” he says.<\/p>\n
Masango has been assisting high schools in Mpumalanga with computer studies for the past four years. He then formed a company, TM- Internet Solutions, so that people could become computer literate at affordable prices. <\/p>\n
“But though the community wants these services, they still can’t afford the prices, even at those lower rates,” he said.<\/p>\n
“I have also secured a relationship with a local college that operates as a testing centre for the training we will be providing. The students don’t just become computer literate, they become among the best in the world.<\/p>\n
‘‘They can obtain an International Computer Driving Licence certificate, and this opens many doors for them when it comes to getting jobs, or even when they want to study further to open their own IT training schools,” Masango says. <\/p>\n
While the demand is great from last year’s matriculants alone, he wonders about other matriculants who are unemployed and who think of computer literacy as the key to becoming employable.<\/p>\n
Masango is hoping that sponsors will come on board soon so that he can begin training at least 10 additional young people. <\/p>\n
He plans to select students who performed well in mathematics and science and who need a chance to succeed in the first step — the ICDL course — which takes six months to complete and consists of seven modules: Basic IT Concepts; File and Folder Management; MS Word 2003; MS Excel 2003; MS Excel 2003 (spreadsheets); MS Access 2003 (database); MS PowerPoint 2003 (presentations); Internet and e-mail (Explorer and MS Outlook).<\/p>\n
While he is waiting for funding from sponsors to come through for training of young people in Mpumalanga, Masango is also in the process of starting up a “one-stop IT shop” on the corner of Commissioner Street and Rissik Street in Johannesburg.<\/p>\n
Here his team of three will be doing computer repairs, upgrades, switching and routing configurations, maintenance, networking, trouble shooting and selling computers. <\/p>\n
“There is a huge demand for Internet solutions and a one-stop shop. People often buy their computers from one place and then go to another company for maintenance or to fix something when it’s gone wrong. <\/p>\n
‘‘I will be providing everything, all services, and under one roof,” he says.<\/p>\n
Computer skills help all small businesses, he says, and he has found that in Mpumalanga most businesses do not use computers because they just don’t have access to them. <\/p>\n
“Yet just through e-mail you save on paper, time and money. Instead, people find that they have to stand in queues in post offices to fax documents and other communications. <\/p>\n
“Also, they often hire experts to do accounts, whereas if they had computers and knew how to use a package such as Pastel, they could save time and money and do their accounts themselves.”<\/p>\n
Masango and his staff of a few young people attended the ICT Academy after matric — which is affiliated to Cida City Campus. <\/p>\n
They acquired the following certifications: ICDL (the International Computer Driving Licence; A+ (which is the Hardware and Software); N+ (which is a Networking certificate); CCNA (which is a Cisco Certified Associate FWLAN, Fundamentals of Wireless Local Area Networks), and the BBA (a Bachelor of Business Administration degree).<\/p>\n
Today Masango is passionate about passing on IT and business skills to young people.<\/p>\n
“My dream has always been to be in business and in IT. I want to teach them how to use computers, how computers work, and then they must themselves become IT specialists. I’m very motivated — I always achieve what I set out to achieve.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Entrepreneur can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t help himself \u00e2\u20ac\u201d he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s got to train others<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5127"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5127"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5127\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}