A student team from the University of Cape Town (UCT) has won a top prize at the Global Social Venture Competition (GSVC) held annually at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley).
Their project, Khusela – a low cost fire-detection device for informal housing – was named one of the top five initiatives worldwide and took the GSVC People’s Choice award in the global round – competing against hundreds of entries and winning out against 18 finalists in the last round. The GSVC is the world’s pre-eminent social business plan competition providing aspiring entrepreneurs with mentoring, exposure, and prize money to transform their business ideas into positive real-world impact.

Khusela, which means “protect”, is a low-cost fire detection device and integrated alert service designed for shack-dwellers worldwide.In South Africa, there are on average 10 shack fires a day with someone dying in a shack fire every other day, according to Abahlali baseMjondolo, a South African shack-dwellers’ movement. The next steps for Khusela include making use of recent funding received from the Technology Innovation Agency and UCT to fully develop, test and roll-out about 2,000 devices in a pilot project in South Africa.

David Gluckman, Director of Finance & Operations at Khusela says that there is lots of scope out there for other aspiring social innovators to get involved. “Get out and engage with the community that you wish to serve. Get off the computer, stop writing the business plan, put down the pen and paper and get into your market and find out. In social impact work, it is critical to know with as close to 100% certainty that there is truly a need. That’s true for any business, but specifically in the social impact space where resources are scarce and challenges are huge.”

Khusela is based on the honours thesis of Francois Petousis. The team consists of Samuel Ginsberg, David Gluckman, Emily Vining, Max Basler, and Paul Mesarcik.
It’s not the first South African team to pass through the programme. Last year graduates, the Reel Gardening team, won both the GSVC and the Hult Prize London regional competitions, beating 50 other universities, and was one of six teams globally to compete in the prestigious Clinton Global Initiative.

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 Picture courtesy Sandiso Phaliso/WCN