Aquaponics farming can empower Alex youth

Soweto resident Alex Msitshana, the founder and managing director of Deaf Empowerment Firm (Pty) Ltd , has urged Alexandra and other township communities to take a leaf out of her book and start their own projects.

She was speaking in an interview with Alex News in which she described her abundant love for the deaf after losing her hearing in 2015. She implored people in Alexandra to adopt her model and help their own deaf people.

“Since I started working with the deaf in 2015, I have been inundated by deaf people from all over Johannesburg wanting to join my firm,” Msitshana said.

“My message is that people in Alex and other townships of Johannesburg can start similar projects to empower their deaf counterparts within their own communities. This will help empower deaf people with skills within the communities that they live in, rather than having to relocate and join projects outside their own [communities] that they have grown used to.”

The company empowers the deaf community by upskilling them in various skills and crafts for potential employment or to establish their own enterprises in the skills they have acquired, such as those acquired by the company’s members in aquaponics farming methods.

Her message was echoed by Navisha Bechan-Sewkuran of Mondelez International, one of the funders of the company. She said it would be an ideal situation if other communities could take the lead from Msitshana and establish their own projects, not just with the deaf but other members of the community, and the youth in particular.

“Alex can be one of the townships to take the initiative and develop a similar programme for the youth to alleviate the poverty and joblessness in the township,” she told Alex News in an interview after a tour of the aquaponics farming project from which a group of deaf people from the company completed a two-month training on the farming method and its systems.

“We are prepared to help communities that buy and use our products just as we are doing and have done with Deaf Empowerment Firm since its founding in 2015,” Bechan-Sewkuran added.

Besides supporting the company, Bechan-Sewkuran said Mondelez had been working closely with Inmed South Africa on funding nutrition programmes in schools, including those in Alexandra. “We have just partnered with Inmed on the empowerment of Deaf Empowerment Firm participants in aquaponics farming which I hope will go a long way in breaking the entry barriers into farming such as having to buy masses of land.”

She added that aquaponics farming could be practised in areas of limited space such as Alexandra for self-sustenance or even as a commercial venture.