LLA partner, Kimmona Kannigan with the founder and chairman of the Africa Rising Foundation, Ndaba Mandela
Education is the most powerful weapon that can be used to change the world” – Nelson Mandela
Lanham-Love van Reenen Attorneys together with The High Street Auction Co, Euro Steel and Bidvest are delighted to announce their commitment to Mandela Day 2017.
At Lanham-Love Attorneys we embrace both transformation and empowerment. We are of the firm view that educational empowerment holds the key to true transformation in South Africa.
This year our lawyers and BEE consultants decided to take it a step further and rally the support of our client base to make as big an impact as possible.
To this end we collaborated closely with an NPO called the Africa Rising Foundation (“ARF”) www.arfoundation.co which was founded in 2009 by Ndaba and Kweku Mandela.
The foundation has made significant in-roads in terms of community development since it’s establishment. Their latest brain child is a massive collaboration between ARF and an American based IT company, Redflight Mobile which entails a four day computer programming workshop which has as its sole purpose the upskilling of 75 female students from Mthatha and surrounding areas. Specialist facilitators from the USA have been flown into the country to conduct the workshop.
The project is set to run between 17 July – 20 July for Mandela week. As co-support to Redflight Mobile on this project, Oracle Academy has undertaken to drive knowledge, innovation, skills development, and diversity in the technology fields. Together with Redflight Mobile, Oracle will provide hands-on training to the participants in terms of which the girls will learn how to code in Alice, a Java-based programming language created by Carnegie Mellon. This is a precursor to the long term plan of creating a three year certified database and java curriculum course for both students and Mthatha educators as part of an ongoing commitment to educating the student and academic community on advanced computer sciences.
The rationale behind this project is to cultivate and nurture a self-sustaining generation and to empower local educators with the necessary skills to continue this type of training.
With an entrenched commitment to female empowerment and transformation, Lanham-Love Attorneys together with The High Street Auction Co, Euro Steel and Bidvest have thrown their weight behind this initiative together with other corporate sponsors including Avis and the Garden Court Holiday Inn in Mthatha under the auspices of Tsogo Sun.
As an additional incentive to our young participants the Samsung VR Team in Los Angeles, has generously donated 360 VR cameras to the workshop to reward winning teams for their innovative thinking in order to foster a culture of creative thinking.
Lanham-Love Attorneys take this opportunity to thank our co-sponsors in helping realise this vision and we wish the Africa Rising Foundation all the best for Mandela week.
