D-DAY FOR RSSC YES CONTESTANTS

SIMUNYE - Timing, perseverance, and months of trying will eventually make three youth members from the northern Lubombo region look like an overnight success as RSSC will be awarding winners of the RSSC Youth Entrepreneurship Support programme next Wednesday.

This awarding ceremony comes in time with the Global Entrepreneurship Week which is celebrated worldwide during one week each November and this year the GEW will be held from November 12-18, 2018.
The company’s obligation to contribution to the socio-economic development of the Kingdom of Eswatini continues as RSSC will honour the best 3 contestants of the RSSC Youth Entrepreneurship Support (YES) initiative with a sum of E100 000.
RSSC introduced the competition aimed at promoting industrial innovation within the youth. The competition is about supporting an enabling environment for the youth to prototype and commercialise their ideas, creating sustainable enterprises that will shift the paradigm from consumers to makers of innovative products and services. 
RSSC Group Public Affairs Manager Sifiso Nyembe said; “The RSSC Youth Entrepreneurship Support offers training, mentorship and seed grant funding of E100 000 to the top three contestants of the programme. In total this competition received more than 100 entry forms from the youth based in five communities with the northern Lubombo Region namely; Tshaneni, Mhlume, Vuvulane, Tabankulu and Simunye, although only 30 participants were shortlisted to battle for the top three positions. The competition seeks to target youth between the ages 18 to 35.”
“As a corporation we noted that there is plenty of ideas among the youth that are untapped because there are not enough platforms that can harvest these ideas and the available platforms benefit the youth in urban areas.”
The sugar company’s mouthpiece added that with the Kingdom’s high rate of unemployment and the gap being enormous among the youth, sustainable job creation is through entrepreneurship because the latter has the ability to create more jobs for more people.
“You give a hungry man a fish and you feed him for a day, yet if you teach him to fish, you have given him an occupation for that will feed him for a lifetime,” Nyembe quoted.   
Noteworthy is that all the participants of the programme benefitted because of the training, mentorship and experience of the competition. The program also aims at capacitating the contestants beyond the competition and ensuring sustainable livelihood to combat challenges often faced by young people such as unemployment.