Founder: Babuyile

Why is Mirriam a Community Builder?

Instead of complaining about crime in South Africa, Mirriam Zwane founded rehabilitation project Babuyile - meaning "they have come back" - to help ex-prisoners fit back into their communities in positive ways.

The Babuyile programme facilitates rehabilitation, counselling and skills training in different fields to enable offenders to become contributing, income-generating members of the community. This helps prevent repeat offending, thereby breaking the cycle of crime and punishment.

Miriam maintains that the pay-off of the project is not only in the financial independence of ex-prisoners, but in restoring people's faith in themselves and their abilities, and seeing families changed by the project.

In her own words ...

"When I started this project I noticed that people were losing hope, there were no jobs, there were no skill centres for them to get training from, and I thought Babuyile is just the right type of place for people to start getting those types of skills and also to get that hope."

Fast Facts

• Mirriam Zwane was finalist for the 2007 IT Web IT Personality of the Year award.
• She is a co-founder and a director of Praxis Computing.
• In 2003, she was awarded the African ICT Achiever prize for her exceptional contribution to ICT.

How can I help?

If you have any skills which you can transfer, why not volunteer to be a trainer at Babuyile? Contact Mirriam on mirriam@praxis.co.za

Story published on SAinfo on 27 June 2008.
Source: Brand South Africa