Tourists in Soweto, the township southwest of Johannesburg in South Africa, now have more options for staying in the same neighbourhood that was once home to two Nobel laureates, Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
Here, through accommodation app Airbnb, locals are increasingly turning entrepreneurs throwing open their homes for visitors wanting to savor Kasi life. As many as 20 Soweto homes are listed hosts on the Airbnb search engine – and the list is growing.
Take Nelson Tiko Mashele, a 33-year-old born and bred in Soweto, who founded Vilakazi Backpackers on the famous Orlando West street with his father, and which is located five minutes from the homes of Mandela and Tutu, and 10 minutes from the Hector Pieterson memorial.
Mashele is one of the youngest Airbnb hosts in Soweto, and his establishment one of the newest in the area. He says 70% of his guests are locals, the rest international, and business is looking good.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/woman/2017/10/06/sharing-economy-400000-guests-home/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: The Sharing Economy: 400,000 Guests At Home</a>
The day we visit, we are ushered into his spotless living room. A coffee table in the middle of the foyer is laden with sightseeing pamphlets. Hip hop music is playing in the background. The seven-bedroom house is well-appointed and Mashele charges R299 ($25) a night.
<div id="attachment_35881" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-35881" class="wp-image-35881 size-large" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/rooom-1024x681.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="681" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/rooom-1024x681.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/rooom-300x199.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/rooom-600x399.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/rooom-768x510.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/rooom.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />A room at the Vilakazi Backpackers costs R299 ($25) a night. Photo by Karen Mwendera.</div>
That’s not a bad bargain for the local life that his guests, who he says are mostly from America, Germany, Brazil and France, want to experience.
According to Airbnb, most guests choose to live like locals. Mashele says they would rather walk to tourist destinations and buy local food from the outlets on the famous Vilakazi Street.
One of Mashele’s partners is Soweto Outdoor Adventures run by Kgomotso Pooe, also his long-time friend. Their collaborations offer his guests quad-bike tours, paddling and boating rides, trips to Orlando Towers and indulging in local cuisine such as magwenyas (deep-fried dough balls) with atchar and white liver and kota (half loaf of bread filled with curry), ending the day with a shisanyama (meat cooked over an open fire).
On the opposite side, in Orlando East, is a bed-and-breakfast in operation for over 16 years. TDJ’s BnB is a home-owned business catering for local and international visitors. Their aim this year is to start using the Airbnb services to help increase their profits.
“We are looking forward to getting new guests from all over the world,” says TDJ’s manager Nomthandazo Ntshingila.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/sometime-in-africa/2012/08/01/staying-in-hotels/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: Staying In Hotels</a>
She says joining Airbnb will give her an edge moving her numbers higher than the average 30 visitors she receives per month. Currently, a room at TDJ’s costs R454 ($38) a night.
For a more authentic experience, tourists can taste African beer brewed at the guest house. Another hotspot guests can visit is Sakhumzi, a Sowetan shisanyama restaurant and bar.
A key difference between Mashele’s and Ntshingila’s businesses is that the former has Wi-Fi on site allowing him to stay active on social media.
“One of the requirements to host with Airbnb was to offer Wi-Fi services to potential clients. We then got Wi-Fi before listing on the app,” says Ntshingila.
Hosts need to be constantly connected to an online platform and keep the most updated information on their availability and business.
The accommodation hosting platform tells FORBES AFRICA they are working on refining their offerings and making “regular updates to ensure people get exactly what they are looking for”. It’s clear that for the app to take off in townships like Soweto, homeowners need to be empowered with technology.
Airbnb says it’s planning to invest $1 million from 2018 to 2020 to promote and support community-led tourism projects in Africa. The project aims to support training in hospitality and technology for township residents.
Indeed, such investments will also help upskill those living in less-developed areas within Soweto such as Kliptown and Pimville, and as a result, reduce the barriers for entrepreneurs wishing to rent out their homes and bring in precious tourism dollars, much-needed in today’s difficult times.

air-bnb

Living Like Mandela

Life in Nigeria today is like living in a dilapidated caravan, or driving around in a fancy jalopy.
When this sort of accommodation or transportation is your daily reality, then your long-term ambitions become hobbled by the pragmatic quest to simply make it to the next day’s hustle, the next salary, the next windfall or gift from that well-to-do cousin, and perhaps, for businesses, waiting for that large order that may never come. Under these faltering conditions, a balanced diet, quality education, satisfactory healthcare, comfortable and safe transportation, and strategic focus become luxuries.
For most folks, simply existing has become a risk; and for businesses and corporate citizenship, a wasteful pleasure. Phrases like “the economic growth and recovery plan” begin to sound somewhat pretentious. Another government mirage perhaps. Sadly, the disdain for diligence is rife and few Nigerians seem convinced that patriotism has its rewards. The paradox of hoping for affluence has become a pandemic, with citizens, companies and communities prowling around for scarce resources and opportunities like a herd of famished goats. Even government’s uptake of loans – $1 billion from the African Development Bank (AfDB) and $1.3 billion from China’s Exim Bank for rail projects – has not restored confidence in the shaky polity. Another $1 billion World Bank facility is expected to flow into government’s coffers in 2017, says Nigeria’s Finance Minister, Kemi Adeosun.
“The economy is on the path to recovery and confidence in the macro-picture is key,” Adeosun told CNBC Africa anchor Wole Famurewa in February. “Government is focused on investing in the priority areas of power and infrastructure… even as we continue work on payroll clean-ups and efficiency at the state level…”
The dire economy will not stop government from taking its statutory pound of flesh from companies, as oil revenues now represent only 10% of GDP. So, tax reforms will take center stage. At 6%, Nigeria has one of the lowest tax to GDP ratios in the world, with Ghana at 15% and South Africa 24%, Adesoun cautions, warning that “we should be very careful about getting excited about recent crude oil price recovery.”
At the micro level, pervasive poverty, disdain for Abujanomics and the proliferation of dodgy pyramid/Ponzi schemes is the new social order. Camouflaging as financial literacy, network marketing or empowerment programs, they represent on one side, the quest for overnight wealth and absolute disregard for government’s agenda and promissory notes, and on the flip side, the emergence of a new breed of professional charlatans peddling crafty concepts in an increasingly sophisticated economy.  Somebody needs to commission a poll to measure Nigeria’s social desperation index.
In a risk-averse, reward-hungry society such as this, contemporary concepts and capabilities like coding, digital literacy, big data analytics, cybersecurity, the Internet of Things (IOT) and artificial intelligence (AI) are farfetched ideas. Non-profits like the Lagos-based Book Club, which has been promoting the altruistic pleasures of reading books and advocating for a return to the culture of heuristics, seem largely ignored, their activities lost in the babble of personal, communal and corporate survival.
The nation seems to have lost a large portion of its liberal ethos. The number of pepper soup joints and event centers has now surpassed the number of libraries and bookstores in the land. Clearly, the pursuit of leisure and lucre has overtaken the quest for the wealth of knowledge to be found on books – or e-books.
But it is difficult to grow a culture of reading and research when citizens go to bed every night with hunger in their bellies and hyperinflation on their minds. Consumer price inflation peaked at an 11-year high of 17.9% in September 2016 and had neared 19% by February. “2016 was defined by politics and policy spats… our currency and foreign exchange issues led to the economy catching cold. But as we entered 2017 the forex issue moved from being a cold into financial pneumonia stage,” Kayode Oguntayo, a Lagos-based entrepreneur told this writer.
Notwithstanding these issues, Nigeria’s $1 billion Eurobond was eight times oversubscribed during its early hours of trading on the London Stock Exchange last February. The 15-year bond offering 7.875% in trading is the first Nigerian offering since 2013 and the 2015 change of government. Nigerian legislators had last year rejected government’s plan to raise $30 billion through loans.
Could Nigeria be flirting with a new era of economic rejuvenation?

Risks, Rewards  And Eurobonds

‘They Keep On Expecting To Get Things  For Free’’

John Schooling lived up to his name and loved working as a high school teacher. Quitting the classroom and becoming an entrepreneur in construction had nothing to do with not liking his job.
“It was 1984, and I was tired of being broke halfway through the month,” he says. “My best friend from school and I then set up our own business doing renovations and restoration jobs.”
The company grew from strength to strength, growing into a very successful construction and development company. When the global financial crisis shattered the world and shook South Africa, Schooling and his business partner were forced to reinvent themselves and their business model.
<div id="attachment_3806" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-3806" class="size-medium wp-image-3806" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/004-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />STAG Student Lodging | Photography by Clare Louise Thomas</div>
“We had planned an upmarket residential development and a hotel on a stretch of land near District Six, in Cape Town. These plans were canned after banks pulled their money from our investors,” he says.
“We then found out that the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT), situated near that particular stretch of land, was struggling with a student accommodation shortage of 6,000 beds. We did some further research and found out that the countrywide deficit of adequate student accommodation amounted to some 200,000 beds. We decided to tap into this market, giving way to the Student Accommodation Group or STAG African.”
Schooling’s statements are reflected in the Ministerial Review of SA University Accommodation, presented by the Department of Higher Education last year. The report shows a shortfall of 207,800 university beds, meaning that less than 10% of first-year university students can be accommodated on campus. The reality is much worse as the ministerial figures exclude the shortfall at tertiary education institutions other than universities, including so-called technical vocational education and training colleges.
“The deficit at these institutions may be as high as another 200,000 beds,” says Schooling, noting that the available on-campus residences, particularly in impoverished areas, are not always in tip-top shape. “These residences are often dilapidated, unhygienic and unsafe. It is apparently not uncommon for as many as six students to share a tiny room.”
Solving this issue is critical. Research has shown that first-year students, who have a roof over their head at university, have an 80% chance of passing. This is double the pass rate of those roughing-it without.
Fixing this problem is unfortunately an expensive affair. According to the government, is costs some $3.6 billion to provide a decent roof over the heads of all students in South Africa.
“This is the price tag when one builds with bricks and mortar,” says Schooling. “STAG African does things differently, as we use Light Steel Framing (LSF).”
This technique has been used in Europe and the United States for at least half a century. It uses galvanized steel structural wall frames, floor joints, roof trusses with single skin brick walls or fiber cement boards as wall cladding.
“Building a LSF structure is 40 percent quicker than building that same structure out of bricks and mortar. The process also requires significantly less energy, making LSF construction even more cost efficient,” says Schooling.
There is another reason why LSF structures are more energy efficient than conventional buildings.
“The wall cladding comprises material from renewable forests and fiber cement. As a result you need 80 percent less energy to warm up and cool down a building to maintain an ambient temperature. On top of that, we fit our buildings with LED lights and heat pumps, which reduces energy usage even more,” he says.
STAG African has built a roof over the heads of 1,055 students. Various other projects are in the pipeline, including a 2,046-bed residence at the University of Fort Hare, in Alice, and an extension of the residence at the University of Stellenbosch’s Tygerberg Medical Campus.
“The 208 additional beds we are building will make this the greenest residence in Africa,” says Schooling.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-3807" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/002-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />
Making way for energy efficient buildings is no luxury in South Africa, a country which faces a persistent energy crisis. Since 2008, the national power generator has struggled to meet the country’s energy demand. The power cuts are costing the economy up to $7.3 billion per month, according to the government.
While building decent, energy-efficient student residences, Schooling intends to create as many jobs as possible, particularly for young people. Data from the International Labour Organization (ILO) reveals that 52% of South Africans aged between 15 and 24 are neither at school, nor at work. As a result, 61.3% of all South Africans living in poverty are under the age of 25.
One of the main causes of the above scenario is a lack of skills. This is where STAG wants to come in.
“LSF building skills are much easier to learn and teach than building the conventional way. Apart from that, it is a new and very relevant skill in the South African context, for which there is a high demand locally. With the work STAG has in the pipeline now, we could create 12,500 sustainable, permanent jobs. We unfortunately do not have enough people with the right skills,” says Schooling.
“Our aim, therefore, is to offer training colleges to teach LSF building techniques to their students, while employing them. We will even draw up a curriculum. We can work up someone who is unskilled to highly skilled in two years. This is good for us, this is good for them, and for those whom rely on them financially: one laborer in South Africa on average supports seven to eight dependents.”
The pull of the classroom is still strong for Schooling, the teacher turned entrepreneur.

Tag: Accommodation

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

Living Like Mandela

Risks, Rewards And Eurobonds

‘They Keep On Expecting To Get Things For Free’’

Three Birds, One Stone