RLabs

Senior Citizens Empowered with Mobile Training

Nathaniel — Thu, 10 May 2012 19:43:15 +0000

This week has been a week of Outreach for our team in Cape Town, with one of the biggest projects being our mobile senior training session consisting of 90 senior citizens in the community.

In our communities our senior members are usually given mobile phones as a gift or a necessity by their children, but with no knowledge of how to operate the device. So the RLabs team in Cape Town went out to empower 90 of our senior citizens with everything they needed to know about using their mobile devices effectively.

The training consisted of basic operations when using your cellular phone such as knowing how to receive and make phone calls, sending and receiving a sms (short messaging service) as well as becoming familiar with their network operators.

With our senior citizens only knowing how to use a telephone, they left the training session with more courage, boldness and patience to make use of their mobile devices effectively.

Use Facebook to Comment on this Post

South Africa: Hope transmitted into a Night Shelter

Rabia — Wed, 09 May 2012 11:01:24 +0000

Today RLabs – Cape Town set into motion another one of it’s outreach community programmes, with a group of people from The Haven Night Shelter. The programme will run over an eight week period, where the group from The Haven will be empowered with Social Media training and given a place to experience some of the most popular Social Media tools as a platform to share their stories.

The Haven is a temporarily night shelter for the homeless people with various disadvantaged backgrounds. Many of the participants stepped in with a high degree of excitement, already visioning themselves with one of their own laptops in an office. The fact of using a laptop and not a desktop has already impacted their experience and something new for them.

For the first day the group was taken through an introduction to Social Media and left the RLabs headquarters audacious and privileged to have their own email accounts.

Use Facebook to Comment on this Post

Twitter School with the Legacy Group

admin — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 12:04:42 +0000

Young people from the community who attends the Legacy programme, a leadership course about making a difference and leaving a legacy, were in for a surprise today as they attended Twitter School. Twitter School is where we introduce community members to Twitter (via PC and mobile) and allow them to share stories and report on what is happening in their community. We definitely excited seeing the young people doing well and as young leaders they taking up their responsibility to share positive stories using social networking as a medium.

Use Facebook to Comment on this Post

RLabs in Finland: Breaking Bad

admin — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 11:18:08 +0000

I was invited as a guest speaker at the Aalto Global Impact launch event where the discussion was Inclusive Business. Below is the presentation with the key fundamental points of an Inclusive Business being the existence of an Eco-System to Innovate, Empower, Educate, Scale and Sustain.

5. Marlon Parker

View more presentations from rahimsaatov

Source: http://marlonparker.com

Use Facebook to Comment on this Post

Hope projected through the Lens of a Camera

Rabia — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 19:15:36 +0000

Photography Principles, a 10 week course offered by the RLabs Academy is drawing to a close this week. The 10 week course has been an amazing journey for the 18 students/participants who showed a full interest to the short learning experience.

The RLabs Academy has revolutionised photography by projecting hope to people through the lens of a camera. For some of the students, photography was seen as just pointing a camera and snapping a picture, and to others as just another hobby. And to the uncertainty of career paths for some of the learners, the class seemed to have brought them to a place of stability as to what their passion and purpose in life is.

Throughout this 10 week period, for many of them it became more than just a photography course, but a business opportunity and career that would want to be pursued. Robyn Carsterns, one of the students shares her experience below:

Use Facebook to Comment on this Post

South Africa: Uusi reaches 100,000 users on Mxit

admin — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 22:38:34 +0000

The continuous growth of Uusi has led to more than 100,000 users via Mxit accessing the jobs and career services offered by the RLabs 2012 Innovation Incubator start-up. According to Terence Hendricks, founder of Uusi “we never expected such a response and clearly there was a big advantage soft-launching it on Mxit”.

Three lessons learned from the Uusi experience are:

1) Launch your product as quickly as possibly to gain traction
2) Learn from the feedback of the users
3) Re-iterate the process and use learning experience to improve product.

We will continue following the journey of the Innovation Incubator and Accelerator start-ups in Cape Town, South Africa.

Use Facebook to Comment on this Post

RLabs Namibia: Youth breaking ground as Digital Entrepreneurs

admin — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 13:10:24 +0000

It has been an exciting few days with the RLabs team in Namibia. This is the second part of the training in partnership with NBIC (you can read about the last session here). The training allowed the budding young entrepreneurs to get their innovative and creative hats on by setting up a Digital and Mobile Agency in Namibia (this will be a partner for the Social Media Factory).

Key aspects that the team did over the last few days were:

- Defining Problems
- Fore-sighting in seeing Namibia in the year 2020
- Creating Value and building digital products
- Idea Generation
- Business Modelling

The team already have NBIC as their first client and seeing how the team are maximizing the use of Social Media is encouraging.

Use Facebook to Comment on this Post

Indigo Trust awards grant to our Innovation Incubator

admin — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 17:36:48 +0000

RLabs in South Africa received a grant from Indigo Trust to assist with the setup of our Innovation Incubator and Accelerator in Cape Town. This exciting partnership will ensure that our Incubator will be furnished, equipped, business support and capacity building of the social entrepreneurs.

RLabs would like to thank Indigo Trust for the grant and looking forward to see the growth of the social enterprises in the incubator.

Use Facebook to Comment on this Post

Legends of 2012 enter the Blogosphere

Clinton — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 17:46:53 +0000

There are new group of RLabs Legends that recently made their appearance in the Blogosphere. The Legacy group were introduced to blogging last week and for many of them it was the first time. At first they were a bit They listened intently, soaked up as much information as they could and by the end of the session they all posted their very first blog post.

Well done Legends of 2012! Keep on blogging and spreading those stories of hope.

Use Facebook to Comment on this Post

South Africa: RLabs Academy creates an appetite for learning

admin — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 18:48:29 +0000

We’ve just reached midway of our second month in the Academy and the buzz when the community scholars gather is something to behold. They have so much energy and a great appetite for learning that it is amazing to see how they’ve grown since the beginning of the year.

RLabs currently have an offering of 20 courses FREE to the community and have had more than 400 applicants to attend the academy for the first 6 months. Three aspects we’ve learned about creating community driven learning environments that proves to be very useful are:

1) Open learning environments that are filled with community champions

2) Unconventional learning approaches

3) Do not compromise the quality of the learning experience.

We’ve already seen more of our academy members showing interest for further studies, considering applying what they’ve learned in their work environments and to start their own businesses as well as showing the desire to return RLabs as a facilitator.