SA Women of the Year 2004 finalists announced

The finalists of the 2004 Shoprite Checkers / SABC 2 Women of the Year Award have been announced in Johannesburg on Thursday, 1 July 2004. These 29 outstanding achievers selected from over 1 000 nominations countrywide, will now compete for the Shoprite Checkers / SABC 2 Women of the Year title. 

This year’s finalists include a woman hailed as one of the most powerful marketing agents in our country, Harvard Science graduates, the pioneer of children’s theatre in South Africa and a teenager whose invention saves the precious resource of water. 

The Shoprite Checkers / SABC 2 Women of the Year Award, a major initiative for National Women’s Day, identifies and pays tribute to the most exceptional and achieving women in the country, whose unswerving commitment and dedication have made a tangible difference to their communities and society as a whole. 

This year the Award has grown to include a ninth category while for the first time in its history the Award will not announce an overall winner. The premier accolade for achievement by women will honour nine winners in nine categories. These outstanding women will share the Shoprite Checkers / SABC2 Women of the Year Award. 
The winners of the Award will be announced during a gala event at the Cape Town International Convention Centre and broadcast on National Women’s Day, Monday 9 August 2004 at 21h00 on SABC 2, and re-broadcast on Tuesday 10 August on SABC 2 at 12h00. 
Inserts of the following finalists in each of the nine categories can be seen on SABC 2 from Thursday 15 until Thursday 29 July 2004 after the 19h00 Afrikaans and 20h30 Sesotho news broadcasts: 

ARTS & CULTURE 
Gauteng-based Joyce Levinsohn, a pioneer of children’s theatre in South Africa, established Children’s Theatre Productions in 1976 and has since been relentless in her quest to expose children of every race to the magic of interactive, high quality theatre. She firmly believes that the performing arts communicate in a universal language, which builds bridges across cultural, economic, racial and religious divides. In 2001 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Arts and Culture Trust and to date she has staged thousands of performances for underprivileged schools, children’s homes and institutions. 

Ms Levinsohn uses children’s theatre as a vehicle to foster the growth of language, literature and life skills, and provides cognitive benefits to children from every community. Since 1989 as Executive Director of the Johannesburg Youth Theatre Trust, she has facilitated Theatre-in-Education life skills programmes which address prevailing social issues including substance abuse, HIV/Aids, sexual molestation, teen and family violence. Quality productions are aimed at teaching children about the heritage and cultural practices of others, while providing a context in which to discover their own important place in South Africa’s multicultural society. She has put children’s theatre on the map of the South African theatrical industry, and nurtured and promoted the talents of emerging black actors and actresses. 

Gauteng-based Masingita Masunga has given physically disabled people throughout South Africa an opportunity to make valuable contributions to society through projects created by her Tinyungubyiseni Talent Promotions company. As the company’s Managing Director and a champion of the disabled from an early age, Ms Masunga has overcome her own disability of cerebral palsy to establish an organisation that motivates men, women and the youth. 

Tinyungubyiseni staged the country’s first beauty pageant for the disabled, the Miss Confidence SA competition, and promotes Nyeleti – Star Beyond Limits, a music competition for people with disabilities. A culmination of initiatives undertaken by people with disabilities for people with disabilities, the organisation embarks on initiatives countrywide. These include workshops and training, a soccer tournament, motivational talks and schools tours, all of which aim to raise public awareness about people with physical disabilities, and serve to reinforce the fact that disability does not mean inability. 

Promoting music as a powerful force for healing and change, Gauteng-based Susan Harrop-Allin’s commitment and belief in the role of arts and culture in transformation and development led to the founding in 2000 of EYETHU Soweto Music Project, which teaches young musicians and integrates them into different communities as well as youth orchestras. 

Ms Harrop-Allin was introduced to the piano at the age of four and became involved in outreach initiatives from the age of 17. She initiates and manages national music development projects with The Youth Orchestra Company, Dedel’ingoma Creative Arts Healing and Apollo Music Trust, and she also fundraises to sustain these music development projects. She is currently training previously disadvantaged teachers in music education for the Curriculum Development Project in partnership with Wits University School of the Arts, and in early July 2004 will represent South African music development and education at an international conference in Spain. 

BUSINESS ENTREPRENEURS 
Sabina Khoza, one of South Africa’s top poultry farmers, is taking her knowledge to the community via the Fair Deal Education and Production Training Centre, which she has initiated on her Fair Deal Poultry Farm at Zuurbekom near Soweto. The first group of trainees completed their course in November 2003, and close on 100 farmers, the majority of whom are women, have graduated from the centre prior to starting their own small businesses. 

Ms Khoza entered the business world in 1988 with just 10 chickens and very little knowledge of farming. Now producing 150 000 birds annually, she has been the recipient of numerous farming-related awards, including Female Farmer of the Year. She is currently serving her second term as President of the Gauteng Provincial Farmers Union and is also secretary-general of the National African Farmers’ Union. Ms Khoza’s successful farming venture incorporates the latest technology and farming methods, and additional community projects include vegetable and maize production, as well as a guesthouse, which accommodates trainee farmers. 

Nunu Ntshingila, widely regarded as a guiding light for those entering the advertising industry, is also one of the highest ranking black females in advertising and chairperson of one of the top three creative agencies in the country, chairperson of the Association for Communication and Advertising (ACA), and a board member of the Media Development and Diversity Agency. 

The recipient of the 2004 Financial Mail AdFocus “Agency Leader of the Year” award, Ms Ntshingila started her advertising career at Ogilvy as an account manager in 1988. Her career includes roles as acting GM of SA Tourism, communications director of Nike SA, and Client Service Director at Herdbuoys prior to her role as Chairperson of Ogilvy Johannesburg. A great asset to the industry in terms of her level-headed approach to transformation and her active involvement with the future of the industry research project, she has contributed extensively to industry training and played a key role in the establishment of the Mamalu Consortium with Moss Mashishi and Wendy Luhabe. 

Bev Moodley-Pryde, in her capacity as Investment, Marketing and Communications Manager of the Gauteng Economic Development Agency (GEDA) and together with her team, facilitated R1,5bn of new investments in the province during 2003, leading to the creation of more than 2 500 sustainable jobs. Ms Moodley-Pryde is regarded as one of the most powerful marketing agents in South Africa and she plays a significant role in the growth and upliftment of the province by putting GEDA on the international map and reaffirming its significance to local and foreign investors. GEDA is the international marketing arm of Gauteng’s Blue IQ initiative. 

As Gauteng earns 10% of Africa’s total Gross Domestic Product and contributes 33,9% to South Africa’s GDP, with Johannesburg alone responsible for 11% of the total, Ms Moodley-Pryde’s motivated efforts are important not just to GEDA and Gauteng, but also to national prosperity. 

COMMUNITY 
Nomthunzi Joyce Mali is a faith healer by calling, and has embarked upon her own extraordinary quest to reach out to people. A true community builder who has assisted with a number of projects in the impoverished Zigodlo Village near Debe Nek in the Eastern Cape, she has given hope to orphans and street children, promoted spiritual healing and focused on the reduction of crime through a number of youth development projects. 

Acknowledging the importance of feeding the body, the mind and the soul, her projects have been instrumental in offering hope and a more positive outlook to community members through the developing and furnishing of schools as well as churches in her area. She has also founded two successful gospel groups and facilitated the building of a gym. 

Mary Lwate, founder of the Good Hope Community Organisation in Lebanon near Winterveld in the North West, is an inspiring role model and active leader who, with only a Grade Four education, has developed a number of beneficial community projects in one of the country’s most impoverished areas. 

Ms Lwate started the Good Hope Community Organisation in 1997 in order to care for abandoned and abused children, and her extended family has grown from 18 girls to over 170 children aged between several months and 20 years. In addition to caring for the children, she ensures they attend school and helps to teach them skills such as baking, dressmaking and knitting. The children have formed a soccer team, netball team and drama group, and have won three prizes for their singing. The drama group was national winner of the Cultural Calabash for 2001. Ms Lwate’s projects have drawn the interest of international organisations such as the Taiwan Buddhist Compassion Relief Fund, which donated a home for the children and has paid for school fees, and an American organisation that supported one of her beadwork projects. 

Maria Mello, founder of the Makotse Women’s Club (MWC), a women’s organisation operating from Makotse Village in the Capricorn district in Limpopo, has overcome incredible odds to focus on the upliftment of the standard of living of rural communities in her area. Makotse Village and its surrounding areas are characterised by a high poverty rate, high unemployment, illiteracy, teenage pregnancy, and low life expectancy. 

The MWC is engaged in sustainable community building projects which focus on baking, gardening, HIV/Aids awareness, managing the elderly and crèche development. It has created jobs for around 40 community members and has reached some 35% of the area’s population through its community initiatives. 

Beka Ntsanwisi, a presenter with community-based radio station Munghana Lonene FM in Limpopo, is a selfless, committed and dedicated member of the community, who uses her voice on the airwaves to assist disadvantaged residents in the area. Her gospel radio programme has become a vehicle to encourage people to help one another, and Ms Ntsanwisi has facilitated projects that include the building of the Pfukani Bakery and a care centre for the disabled near Giyani. 

More than just a radio show, her programme is regarded as a lifeline for the poor and needy, and her response to the needs of community members knows no bounds. A community leader and visionary, she is a people’s person who, while undergoing treatment for cancer, still goes beyond the call of her duty to elevate the lifestyle of community members. “Mama Beka” has also helped women to start their own brick- and fence-making business, “Tiyimeleni Va Manana” (Work for Yourselves Mothers), in Makumeke. 

EDUCATION 
Professor Letticia Moja, the first black woman to head a South African medical faculty, is a brilliant academic and leader who firmly believes in the great need for training of black doctors. Professor Moja stepped into her new role as Dean of the Faculty of Health Science at the University of the Free State in January 2004, after fulfilling the role of Vice-Dean of the faculty from 2002. Prior to this she headed the Gynaecologic Oncology Unit at Ga-Rankuwa Hospital in Pretoria from 1997 to 2002. 

Professor Moja is widely acknowledged for her leadership, dedication and compassion, and as someone who continually focuses on improving the circumstances of others, she inspires all that come into contact with her. She is passionate about unity and harmony while maintaining cultural differences, and is held in high regard by a broad cross-section of colleagues both young and old. A competent leader, she also serves on the Medical and Dental Board and the Health Professions Council representing women’s issues and minority groups. 

Kelebogile Dilotsotlhe, one of the few women worldwide to head up a science centre, is the CEO of Gauteng’s new Sci-Bono Discovery Centre, which aims to make science more accessible to young people. South Africa has been identified internationally as one of the countries to succeed with science centres and this Science Graduate is determined to position the Sci-Bono Discovery Centre as champion of the struggle to bridge the scientific and technological divide between learners. Aimed at making every learner in Gauteng science-literate, the Sci-Bono centre focuses on innovative and exciting programmes for learners and educators, which help translate work from paper to practice. 

As a previous science lecturer, senior lecturer, Head of Department, circuit manager and National Director for Science and Society, Ms Dilotsotlhe is well positioned to offer learners a new outlook on science and technology. She also serves as Chair of the marketing and promotions sub-committee of the MTN Science Centre, and on the Advisory Board of the School of Maths, Science and Technology Education at North West University and the board of the South African Quality Institute.

Nomxolisi Matyana has dedicated her career to saving and promoting correct usage of one of the country’s most valued commodities, that of water through educating communities about integrated water resource management, ie water use efficiency, protection of water resources, awareness of invasive alien species and health and hygiene education. A programme manager of the 2020 Vision for Water and Sanitation Education Programme (2020 VFWSEP) which includes the South African Youth Water Prize Competition that culminates in the International Junior Water Prize, she also co-ordinated the country’s first annual Baswa Lee Metse (Youth and Water) Awards. 

Nomxolisi was one of the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry’s first community development officers and responsible for the entire Eastern Cape province, where she established functioning community institutional structures concerning the management of water resources, and she has also been involved in several Presidential lead projects. Now Deputy Director at DWAF, her efforts have elevated the importance of water-related issues to see the inclusion of water and sanitation as part of the Curriculum 2005. Ms Matyana works in collaboration with government departments as well as NGOs and communities throughout South Africa to promote educational awareness on the use of South Africa’s scarcest commodity. 

HEALTH 
Joey le Roux, the first woman to be appointed twice in the top management role of Pretoria hospitals, turned a private hospital into a facility that educates and empowers the local community, while saving the jobs of those working at the hospital. Faced with having to close the hospital and retrench its staff, as Group HR Manager of Pretoria Gynaecological Hospital Ms Le Roux took up the challenge of making the hospital more relevant to the community. She instituted a special care package for mothers-to-be without medical aid that gave them the same standard of healthcare at the hospital at a reduced rate, enabling hundreds of mothers to deliver their babies at the private hospital. The project reduces the burden on state hospitals and gives mothers the benefit of a smaller private institution. Ms Le Roux’s initiative doubled profits at the hospital in the 2002-03 financial year. 

Ms Le Roux is a dynamic self-starter making inroads in the private hospital arena and her strength lies in her business acumen. A belief in the need to be socially responsible has seen her implement programmes that have increased awareness of breast and cervical cancer among women, and during her career she has also developed and implemented feeding programmes for malnourished children, literacy courses and dietary awareness programmes. 

Dr Shereen Usdin, a medical doctor and public health specialist, is the co-founder of Soul City, a locally and internationally acclaimed multi-media health initiative that uses popular media to promote health and development. Soul City reaches over 82% of the South African population and educates the public about national health and development priorities such as HIV and Aids, tuberculosis, maternal and child health, substance abuse and gender violence. The multi-award winning initiative is one of the largest health education projects of its kind, growing into one of the country’s largest NGOs and employing over 50 people. It has shifted social norms, attitudes and behaviours related to ill health, and is responsible for assisting people in taking action to protect their health. 

A Harvard graduate Dr Usdin consults internationally on health, gender and human rights issues. She is a co-founder of ACESS, the Alliance for Children’s Entitlement to Social Security and is also a member of the Steering Committee of the SA Gender Based Violence and Health Initiative to raise awareness on the health impacts of gender violence. She helped establish the Stop Women Abuse Helpline and is the author of “The No Nonsense Guide to HIV/Aids”. 

Taking community nursing to its limit Ruth Maoela, HIV/Aids co-ordinator with the Bethesda Aids Action team, takes her nursing skills and home-based care initiatives to rural areas in the Jozini area of KwaZulu-Natal. Since 1999 she has travelled hundreds of kilometres on a daily basis to educate and train home-based caregivers in a special 10-day course designed for women with only primary school education. Together with teamworkers and stakeholder partnerships within the community Ms Maoela has developed a network of 150 home-based caregivers, which is founded on female volunteers but extends to traditional healers and leaders, and ministers of religion. 

A firm believer in the importance of making Aids and HIV patients feel part of the community, she facilitates awareness projects that focus on bed-bathing and feeding, prevention and treatment of mouth and bed sores, factual information about Aids and caring for those with the disease. The qualified nurse insists she can be more effective in the rural areas rather than being a “bedside nurse” and her projects make a huge difference in the rural areas of KwaZulu-Natal by caring for 90 clients, offering counselling at nine voluntary and testing sites and caring for over 1 130 orphans. 

Media & Communications 
Ferial Haffajee became the first woman editor of a major South African newspaper when, aged only 36, she took over the editorship of Johannesburg-based Mail & Guardian in January 2004. In the year South Africa celebrates ten years of democracy and prepares for its third non-racial elections, Ferial’s appointment to this investigative campaigning paper born during the height of the anti-apartheid struggle, is a triumph for gender equality in South Africa. 

An advocate of quiet and calm leadership, Ferial now reports a two-thirds female contingency in the M&G newsroom and aims to nurture more investigate journalism in the M&G on delicate gender issues, such as the rate of rape and sexual violence in South Africa. Writer of The Little Black Book while still at the Financial Mail, Ms Haffajee is currently compiling a women’s version, to be released in October of this year. 

Pelonomi Makau took on the enormous task of saving a community radio station in the rural area of Taung in the North West, and has since seen its transmission area increase from a 30 km to an 80km radius that incorporates the Taung, Jan Kempdorp, Hartswater, Reivilo, Vryburg, Warrenton and Christiana areas. Since taking up the reins at Vaaltar FM in 2002 she has combated internal resistance within the station against a woman in the role of station manager, and has successfully implemented new systems within the station, including employment contracts and incentive schemes, broadcast policies and presenter training. Pelonomi also instituted annual Children’s Day celebrations involving the SAPS Child Protection Unit, the Department of Health Child Unit and Eskom on electricity safety – to the benefit of the North West youth. 

With no Government funding and only a 30km radius for broadcasting coverage, Pelonomi lobbied local stakeholders and businesses to support the station in the interest of the broader community – their client base. She gradually involved Government departments, advertising agencies and local municipalities to support the station’s survival and negotiated with the Department of Communications and Sentech to increase the broadcasting radius to 80km. Hailed as a woman consolidator of the North West, Pelonomi’s radio station now includes community, business and Government participation to the benefit of all. She is one of only 10 women heading up more than 100 community radio stations in South Africa. 

Maserame Mouyeme is the Group Managing Director of FCB South Africa, the largest advertising and communications companies in the country. Her excellent leadership skills and business acumen have brought her huge respect in the industry and she has been very active in the transformation and educational portfolios of the Association for Communication & Advertising (ACA) and the AAA School of Advertising ensuring access, funding and excellent training for the previously disadvantaged. 

Ms Mouyeme assists talented youths in their learnerships by employing them in FCB South Africa as salaried interns. Here, she has been a major driving force of BEE initiatives, resulting in one of the largest equity ownership deals amongst advertising agencies in South Africa in 2003. A Chartered Marketer, she advocates female representation in top management levels and has promoted many women to directorship at FCB. She serves as vice-chairperson of the ACA and the SAARF Boards. 

Science & Technology 
Professor Tebello Nyokong is researching a ground-breaking new cancer diagnosis and treatment, alternative to chemotherapy, using a red laser light and the same dye used in blue denims, harmless by itself and activated with exposure to light. She is currently collaborating with Russian researchers to acquire a licence to commence clinical trials in South Africa for the Photodynamic Therapy (PDT), which has been approved in some countries abroad and does not destroy hair or healthy cells and does not make the person sick. The project will be a first for South Africa and the Continent. 

Professor Nyokong’s outstanding achievements come as a result of changing her studies in the eleventh grade when she abandoned the arts for science, and in spite of her early childhood as a shepherd in the Free State when her family fled the Sharpeville massacre. She attributes this tremendous success in the sciences to her father’s strong leadership. While she finds being a female researcher lonely and often feels excluded from the primarily male fraternity, Professor Nyokong continues to train, from her base at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, highly skilled chemists – particularly women – with appropriate skills to move South Africa to the front lines of scientific development. 

Eighteen-year old Claire Reid is already a local and international award winner for her “Water Wise Reel Gardening” system that cuts down water usage for growing vegetables by a phenomenal 80%. Claire’s invention offers a breakthrough for water conservation in rural areas in the developing world. Over 70% of the world’s water is used in agriculture and her simple and effective seed-planting system, where seeds are encapsulated inside newspaper strips, cuts down water usage by reducing water leakage into the soil. The newspaper strips keep seeds moist so that they germinate without wasting water and without being eaten by birds, and at the right depth for proper growth. Claire’s first award came in 2002 when she was still a grade 10 student at Gauteng’s St Teresa’s Mercy School. 

In South Africa alone, thousands die each year as a result of starvation and Claire’s innovative, practical and easily applicable technique for planting and successfully germinating seeds in water-scarce areas to improve rural and peri-urban livelihoods, earned her the country’s Women in Water Award for persons under the age of 35. Claire’s New Year’s resolution in 2002 to plant her own vegetables at home, an expensive and futile exercise due to fertiliser and water usage costs as well as the incomprehensible instructions on seed packets, led her to design a system for all Africans to understand and use, regardless of education, language or financial status. 

Dr Sharon Biermann is a geographer whose research into sustainable urban development has brought local and international recognition, and challenges the assumption that the compact city is always the most cost-effective and sustainable. She received the CSIR 2003 Top Achievers Award for her contribution to location and investment decisions for low-cost residential developments that impact fundamentally on the quality of life of South Africa’s urban population, where more than 40% of households are woman-headed. Her work on sustainable housing locations for low-income households at both national and urban settlement levels significantly impacts on addressing the practical needs of women and their need to rise and contribute financially to society. 

She has developed a bulk infrastructure potential cost model, where potential costs are calculated on the basis of demand for services, and her research is highly regarded and used by policy makers at the President’s office in Pretoria on the National Housing Spatial Investment Framework & National Spatial Development Perspective. She regularly visits cities and geologists abroad to find examples of urban developments that could work locally. 

Professor Valerie Corfield has developed The DNA Detective and Design a Food initiatives, introducing the world of science via workshops and kits to educators and learners in disadvantaged communities, where the need for science advancement is the greatest. She especially promotes science with the aim of encouraging young girls to enter this field. Her workshops have been conducted as far afield as the Grahamstown Festival and National Science Week in both Limpopo and the Western Cape, hence sponsored by the Department of Science & Technology’s Public Understanding of Science (PUB) initiative. 

She inspires other scientists, researchers and educators to diminish the inequality of scientific knowledge in South African communities. In her professional capacity as molecular geneticist, she is researching the molecular causes and functional consequences of inherited heart disease, at the University of Stellenbosch MRC Centre for Molecular and Cellular Biology. Her latest government-funded schools science initiative focuses on custom-designing science kits for rural schools in South Africa. 

Social Services 
Cookie Edwards pioneered and co-ordinates the KwaZulu-Natal Network of Violence against Women, which played a major role in the New Domestic Violence Act of 99, the setting up of the Durban Family Court and numerous public safety outreach programmes aimed at improving the fate of abused women in South Africa. Breaking the shackles of her own marital abuse, Cookie’s catalyst came in the form of abuse counselling when, rather late in life, the difference between love and abuse was explained to her for the first time. 

Since that day in 1989, Cookie has been a compassionate ear for her community in Durban, and a voice and haven for abused women in KwaZulu-Natal. She campaigns progressively with Government and NGOs, and plays a major role in the securing of national and international funding to offer hope to abused women throughout the country. Not only has the past sixteen years seen her arrange marches and training workshops provincially, nationally and abroad against woman abuse, but her own home has served as a haven for abused women. Alongside her own three children, three previously disadvantaged girls (two foster, one adopted) have become proud young women in her home care. 

Valentia Kadalie is a social welfare entrepreneur for the aged who has dedicated the past 20 years to making geriatric care an inspiring and fulfilling career. Managing care for the elderly on a regional and national basis, she initiated the Olympiatrics, an annual sports day for seniors, which led to a national physical activity programme for seniors run by the Department of Sport & Recreation. She also started the Holiday Exchange Programme, which annually offers residents of old-age homes a free two-week holiday. 

The City Mission’s GH Starck-Rehoboth Age Exchange in Cape Town, which she has developed over a period of 22 years, is the only comprehensive facility of its kind in South Africa and the only day-care facility for people with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. The project provides accommodation for 136 people and access to professional and rehabilitative services to some 150 day-care clients and is regarded as a best practice model for the care of the elderly that can be replicated anywhere in the world. Here, Val and her team of 32 staff and 56 regular volunteers, the majority of whom are in their golden years (50% are over 70 years of age), provide independent or assisted living, as well as frail, terminal and broader community care for the aged. 

Sister Priscilla Dlamini, a Catholic nun since the age of fifteen, with her own two hands and a R10 000 grant converted old stables into a haven for the destitute hordes of rejected HIV patients dying as beggars in the vast sugar plantations constituting the KwaZulu-Natal hills. She has since received international recognition for her Holy Cross Aids Hospice in eMoyeni near Gingindlovu, Eshowe. 

With no funding for modern medicines, she combined traditional healers’ home remedies to treat opportunistic infections among her Aids patients and her herb garden is now so renowned that healers from the Eastern Cape and Swaziland are buying her remedies. Sister Priscilla and her volunteer caregivers now receive funding from the Holy Cross Children’s Trust in London to take care of an additional 453 child-headed households and 1 121 orphans, and provide home-based care for 2 011 people, and her Hospice has become Spoornet’s Corporate Social Investment flagship in the region. True to her beliefs, to this day Sister Priscilla does not use money to sustain herself but lives off the land and teaches others to follow suit, but amidst all the obstacles facing her and her mission, it continues to thrive. 

Sport 
Modi Marishane-Nyaka, newly elected President of the South African Handball Federation and former Vice-President of the now defunct South African Netball Association, is using her own experience of this once-forgotten sport in South Africa to revive it to one of the top sporting codes amongst the youth. Currently providing national guidance to project implementers in rural and previously disadvantaged for the United Nations Office on Drug Control (UNODC), she firmly believes in the uplifting role played by sport in the development of South Africa’s youth. 

Ms Marishane-Nyaka conducts training programmes and workshops on all-round sports involvement in rural schools nationwide to promote drug prevention therapy amongst the youth. Under the umbrella of Rainbow Interaction SA (RISA), she has taken learners to Moscow for team-building exercises through applied sport and non-verbal communication through body language skills. RISA hosted an international Rainbow event in Cape Town in 2000. 

Lindsey Carlisle, 149-times captain of the internationally competitive SA Women’s hockey team, has represented her country at the Olympics and now shares her love of the sport as a coach and participant of the Southern Gauteng Hockey Association’s “Schools of Excellence” programme, which aims to develop talented young players. Lindsey left her career in graphic design to pursue her passion for sport, and since 1998 she has regularly shared her love of and expertise in hockey with thousands of schoolchildren through coaching clinics. 

From 1997 to 2002, Lindsey was the head coach of the Southern Gauteng Hockey Academy, which provides top coaching to Gauteng’s most talented school and under-21 hockey stars (even male hockey players have joined the Academy due to its high levels of training). Lindsey is presently team coach at St Stithian’s College for Girls and originator of the School of Excellence with the SGHA Academy. 

Mandy Adamson has represented SA golf as a professional woman player on numerous occasions, even though she was diagnosed with ‘Chronic Fatigue Syndrome’ during 2002. During her illness she devoted her time to making important changes to the WPGA and to compile a worthy golf instruction manual, “A Beginner’s Guide to Golf”. It is this Sandtonite’s passion to grow women’s golf in South Africa and to create awareness of the potential career opportunities for lady golfers.

Mandy has played the lowest competitive round in the history of South African women’s professional golf at the Houghton gold course during the Nedbank Ladies SA Masters and currently stands at number 25 worldwide, determined in the HP Open during August 2003.