Despite the pressure of being a business owner, Gabriel Mokwana aspires to be the biggest employer in Africa.
The Fourways resident is an ambitious and self-driven entrepreneur who was born in Limpopo and raised by a single mother. After completing his Grade 12 in 2012, Mokwana registered his first business in the same year. Due to his background, he has always wanted to do his best and bring about complete change, especially in impoverished communities.
He founded the Life Legacy Project SA, a non-profit organisation focusing on enterprise development in 2015. It has since grown to become a powerhouse for education and businesses.
It focuses on training, upskilling, developing small businesses and assisting schools. It was founded on principles and grounds that it will champion change and destitute schools and communities. It all started with R300, but over the years it has grown to be one of the fastest-growing organisations to establish libraries in schools without the help of the government.
Mokwana is also the founder and CEO of Siyasiza Business Fund, a privately held purchase order and invoice financing entity that strives for the betterment of an economically inclusive South Africa through the advancement of entrepreneurship.
They fund SMMEs that are exposed to procurement opportunities from both the public and private sector to stimulate employment through supplier development. Mokwana has assisted numerous small businesses to scale up and has built and donated several libraries and media centres to destitute schools.
“We do this by developing a programme which gets entrepreneurs and small businesses into training on how to run their business successfully,” he said.
When entrepreneurs and owners of small, medium and micro enterprises (SMMEs) complete the programme within the Life Legacy Project SA, they are then linked up with procurement opportunities.
He said when they started the NPO, their focus was to assist businesses to receive funding. “We didn’t have the proper channels or rather didn’t know where to go about getting funding.”
This visionary and individual who believes in the development and upskilling of businesses said he is all about empowering communities. As an entrepreneur, he indicated that he runs two businesses at the same time. “One feeds into the other, that’s how I manage to keep afloat.”
“Entrepreneurship helped me navigate challenges like unemployment by providing a solution to the very same unemployment. I sort of look for opportunities that help not only me but empower the community as a whole.”
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