Khwela Women Seeks To Give Women A Broaden Network Access
Khwela Women Seeks To Give Women A Broaden Network Access. Khwela Women leverages technology to connect young women around the world in local sisterhood circles and an international network, offering support, exposure and access to opportunities and experiential learning in order to become upwardly mobile and grow. Through monthly local sister “hood” circles in safe spaces women share their lived experiences and stories with peers, gaining insights and building resilience. Through circles women nurture the confidence to show up and step into their power, while learning from others.
Its Whatsapp mentor bot Alora, delivers practical personal and career advice on the channel most women across Khwela already engage in. Alora’s content is driven by topical themes that women want to learn more about. Through events and inter-chapter leadership training, women have an opportunity to broaden their network and access opportunities. Access to travel, regular skills training workshops, bursaries, learnerships and its mentorship program are exclusively available for circle members who actively participate.
Experiential learning and travel are at the heart of Khwela: it believes seeing the world from a new perspective, reflecting on the experience and telling one’s story can be transformational and promote the growth mindset needed for social mobility.
Khwela means “to climb” in isiXhosa, one of the wider spoken languages of South Africa, and the mother tongue of one of Khwela’s co-founders, Asanda Daraza. What started off as a brainstorming session on a couch in Cape Town in 2017, soon became a reality when Khwela won an international competition with Booking.com to run a pilot project. The company believes that travel is truly transformative, and that through travel and reflective practice women from under-resourced communities in Cape Town could shift their world view, embrace a growth mindset and learn from experience and skills training how to work in the tourism industry. In the first two years, 80% of the Khwela participants on average went from being unemployed to finding work in the tourism industry.
