Mebala Youth Studios and SOS Children's

Written by: Gabriella Reiss

March 19 2024

Hi everyone,

Today, we visited the Mebala Youth Studios and presented our project plans. Afterwards, we went to SOS Children’s Village to run some activities and a sports day for the children there. 

Mebala Youth Studios is an organization that focuses on entrepreneurship, creativity, sustainability, mental health, and human rights. Mebala means ‘colorful’, and with a wholistic approach to young people, the organization focuses on promoting confidence, creativity, and independence so that the youth they are helping feel more powerful and confident in themselves. This enables them to be who they are and show their true ‘colors’.  One of Mebala's goals is also to provide a safe space for the youth of Botswana, and they do this by allowing local youth to play and hang out on their basketball court and playground. In addition, they advocate for mental health and offer free counseling to people of any age. They have also worked with the Botswana Trans Initiative to support transgender people throughout the country.

A large Mebala project is an entrepreneurial course that works with young people, especially women, and their business ideas to help make their proposals real and successful. Through their program, students can get official degrees and then go to university or vocational studies. One of their projects narrowed down 100 women entrepreneurs to eight finalists who will be presenting their business proposals at the Academy for Women Entrepreneurs Final Pitch Contest later this year. Today, we were actually able to meet these eight finalists and they each gave us their 30 second pitch, which was really interesting!

We also got a tour of Mebala's workplace and learned about the buildings they have on their campus. Many of these building are made from recycled materials, including glass bottles and clay found by the river. This clay is commonly used in Botswana to build houses, and absorbs heat on the outside so that the inside of the building stays cool.

Some of our ideas included getting private donations from ASB parents to the businesses run by the youth Mebala has taught, which would help build personal connections. We also spoke about donating wifi and computers to Mebala for the youth that can't normally access those things in order for them to be able to train and learn with Mebala as well. 

We also thought it a good idea to develop a mental health program to teach in Dukwi and possibility throughout Botswana. We learned today that while Botswana has excellent sexual education, mental health is not often spoken about and taught. The idea is that over the next year ASB students would work online with the counselors at Mebala to develop a mental health course which would be presented and taught at Dukwi Refugee Camp next year, and possibly also taught to youth throughout Botswana with Mebala's help.

Another idea for a course came in response to Mebala's previous efforts to help reduce the rate of gender-based violence in Botswana, as Botswana has one of the highest rates of gender-based violence in the world. This course would focus primarily on boys and men, and would teach them how to treat women. As many efforts to reduce gender-based violence focus on women and girls, switching gears to focus on fighting the social problems that cause it in men and boys is an interesting and promising approach.

SOS Children’s Village is an orphanage outside of Gaborone, and we visited to bring some fun to the kids there. SOS Children’s is set up so that there are many different houses in which there are multiple kids, and a ‘mother’ and ‘auntie’ who help raise the kids, check up on their schoolwork, and generally make sure they’re doing well. The kids at SOS Children's come from really unfortunate circumstances, but nonetheless are so fun and passionate, running around, playing with each other, and showing us tricks form the moment we arrived. Some of the younger kids only spoke Setswana, but most of the older kids spoke English really well, which made it super easy for us all to joke around together. 

Everyone in our group played some part in doing activities with the kids: play-dough and duck-duck-goose for the ones 3-6 years old, and dancing, sack races, soccer, hula-hooping, a rock-paper-scissors game, and bracelet making with the older kids. While we started in our assigned activities, by the end most people had moved around and come up with new games.