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The founder of a Rondebosch based organisation empowering future leaders in Southern Africa is in line for a major business award.
Susannah Farr, the founder and CEO of the GOLD Peer Education Development Agency, has been nominated as a finalist in the Social Entrepreneur category of the Cape Regional Business Achiever Awards, run by the Business Women’s Association (BWA) of South Africa.
The agency works with youth, giving them a lifetime toolkit of skills, leadership development and a connection to future opportunities to inspire change within their schools and communities.
“The vision of the business I began is to see a generation of young African leaders, very often labelled as the ‘youth bulge crisis’ at the bottom of the pyramid, given the platform and tools to confront and overcome the pressures and desperate circumstances that they face,” she says.
“When given the love, opportunity and mandate to influence their peers positively, even the most negative role models begin to have something rise up inside of them.”
They realise that they are valuable, explains Farr.
“They start to value others and fight to be part of a movement of positive change that is bigger than their circumstances. They make tough choices in order to break the patterns of the past.”
Over the past decade the agency has not only reached thousands of young people in communities in South Africa, Botswana and Zambia, but the results and outcomes, measured through an auditing process, are phenomenal.
The BWA provides a valuable platform for the inspiration and empowerment of women in business through a variety of initiatives and opportunities for personal growth and development.
The BWA has presented the Businesswoman of the Year Award since 1980 and also runs regional achiever awards to recognise the achievements of women in business.
These awards actively seek to identify, acknowledge and cultivate entrepreneurs, corporate and professional women leader in the various regions.
