News
My Father Essay Writing Winners Announced
What does the word ‘father’ mean to you? That’s what we asked young writers across the country for our latest essay competition, run in conjunction with Heartlines’ ‘Fathers Matter’ campaign. We received over 1,475 entries for the three categories of Senior (ages...
Zilungile makes the M&G’s 200 Young South Africans list!
FunDza is proud to announce that Zilungile Zimela – Marketing and PR Manager for FunDza – has been selected as one of the Mail & Guardian’s 200 Young South Africans for 2021. She was awarded under the Education category. For the past 15 years, Mail & Guardian...
FunDza – A Literary Melting Pot
The following piece is written by one of our readers and writers, Kingsley Khobotlo. Kingsley was first a ‘Fanz’ writer who we then invited onto a writing course where he wrote a professional story for FunDza, which you can read...
Collaborating with Heartlines over fatherhood campaign
Heartlines is a not-for-profit company that develops values-based interventions supporting social and behavioural change. They also believe in the power of story, and we have always admired their work. So we are delighted to be partnering with them to run a writing...
Biblionef takes over FunDza’s book distribution programme
Four days after FunDza had been officially incorporated as a nonprofit trust, it made its first book donation: 10 copies of the book Broken Promises to Ikamva Youth in Masiphumelele. There was a hand-over event at the Masiphumelele library with dancing, ululating and...
Exciting media partnership begins
Whenever we survey our readers and writers we ask them for suggestions on how we can improve what we do. We get a lot of useful feedback and try to put into action whatever we can, if realistic and possible. Apart from requests for more content, more courses and more...
Getting to know our Fanz writers
A major aim of FunDza is to develop new writing talent amongst young people in South Africa and to provide a space for young people to share their stories, and grow in confidence as writers. Young Fanz writers are invited to send in their work for publication on the...
Winners of That Majola Magic Course Competition Announced
From March to May 2021, FunDza ran a course competition – That Majola Magic – in partnership with the Momentum Metropolitan Foundation. This was a sequel to the highly successful ‘Moving up with the Majolas’ competition. Through the course competition, participants...
What’s working for our unemployed youth
We know from our annual survey that many of our readers – 40% in fact – are unemployed and looking for work. With this in mind, we approached Harambee, an organisation working to support youth in this area, to help us develop a course that would be helpful to them. It...
Growing poets through our Fellowship
This year we launched an exciting new project to develop our young writers: the FunDza Fellowship – a 10-month writing programme for 15 of our aspiring writers, conducted virtually. We selected young people, who had previously submitted Fanz writing or entered FunDza...
Critical skills for challenging times
Our FunDza reader surveys provide us with a wealth of information about the young people who are our community of readers. They reveal the struggles facing them, from lack of finances for study, to how tough it is to find a job. Many of our readers are either...
Njabulo Goba – a rising star!
FunDza first met Njabulo Goba in 2020 when he was one of several talented young writers selected for our "Me With You: Sharing our Stories" writing project that involved 28 young writers in a virtual writing workshop series. At the end of the workshop phase, three...