Awake Mzansi! launches fund-raising drive

In 2019, Awake Mzansi! sponsored a major qualitative research project which aimed to understand how the issue of race affects people’s voting patterns in South Africa.

The qualitative study interviewed 50 people from 4 regions across SA in a mix of one-to-one, pairs and trio interviews. The average interview length was 1 to 1.5 hours and our research team spent 12 days in the field. (3 per region).

We garnered many terrific insights but one of the key out-takes of the project was the real need for a scale-able non-party aligned voter education program aimed at the youth in SA. There are literally no voter education programs in SA that focus on educating youth on how democracy works and how South Africa’s constitutional democracy functions.

Awake Mzansi! believes that voter education is crucial for the survival of SA’s young democracy and that there’s a specific reason the ruling party hasn’t introduced voter education into the high school curriculum. We plan on creating SA’s first non-politically aligned voter educational program in SA.

Our research indicated that a large portion of the youth don’t actually know how it all works. How Parliament works, what fiscal policy is, the difference between local government vs. national government etc. There’s a big knowledge gap amongst the youth which more than likely creates considerable voter apathy at the polls.

The local elections are coming up in May 2021 and many young voters simply have no idea on how their vote works and will simply not vote. We plan on changing this.

We are fund-raising in order to produce SA’s first independent and non-party aligned voter education program. We believe that we are the right platform and Political Action Group

to launch and host this program. We have the credibility and the online community to help us achieve our goals.

We expect that the program would be digital (an e-course) as well as print i.e. possibly in a comic format. Stage 1 will be around understanding the shape and format and we will approach this by doing a pilot. We think it might make sense get a university onboard for  validation and content creation purposes. Perhaps partnering with their Political Science Department and their 3^rd or 4^th year students…

Phase 1 will more than likely be a series of workshops with the universities to help us understand how to structure the program and deliver the content needed.

Phase 2 will be a pilot where we mock up a one or two single learning modules and we test the content and the learner interface with our target audiences.

Please contact us via the contact form if you’d like to help sponsor us or for any offers of assistance.