Coming Saturday (22 January 2011) Ungana-Afrika's Participatory Entrepreneurship Development (PED) project kicks off with its first workshop. In this project Ungana-Afrika assists people who live in disadvantaged communities, but who have plenty of entrepreneurial aspiration and energy, in performing local participatory ICT (Information and Communication Technology) needs assessment, and in the development of business ideas based on identified community needs. Ungana-Afrika then provides business support to help transform those ideas into viable social enterprises that deliver ICT products and services that benefit the poor.

Since this is the first time that Ungana-Afrika runs PED we perceive it as a pilot project and we hope to learn a lot in the process. For the pilot we chose to work in Zandspruit, an informal settlement in the North West of Johannesburg, with an estimated 42,500 inhabitants (26,250 informal, 16,250 formal). In the implementation of this project Ungana-Afrika collaborates with Monash University, the Meraka Institute of the CSIR (Council of Scientific and Industrial Research), and Zandspruit's CBO (Community-Based Organisation) Medupe.

This first workshop will discuss Social Entrepreneurship and teach PED's 12 participants how to use participatory methods for ICT needs assessment. In preparation for this workshop, and the whole project for that matter, Ungana-Afrika developed a training manual that covers what participatory methods are, how you can successfully employ them, and gives details of 43 of such methods. You can find this document here.