Khwela Womxn Seeks To Connect A Virtual Community Of Self Empowered Women
Khwela Womxn Seeks To Connect A Virtual Community Of Self Empowered Women. 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 idea? 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.
As the pandemic shook the globe, the travel industry fell to its knees as people stopped travelling. Khwela took a pause, as the company considered how it could continue to self-empower women in a time where physical travel and learning was not allowed. Through this time, Khwela Womxn was born. Experiential learning and the power of sisterhood remained key to its purpose: that it believes women have the power to change communities, but it had to re-design the program for a low-touch, high impact, post-COVID-19 world.
The organisation leverages technology to equip women with opportunities for experiential learning and increased access to safe peer-mentorship spaces, so that they can transform their mindsets and uplift themselves personally and professionally. Its vision is to connect a virtual community of 100 000 self-empowered women who are able to further inspire others in their community through access to experiential learning, credible education as well as peer-mentorship.
