We went through hundreds of options when we were thinking of a name for the service. We ended up crowdsourcing votes for peoples’ favourite names over Yammer - the microblogging service we use at Clyral.

isiZulu is the language of the Zulu people with about 10 million speakers, the vast majority (over 95%) of whom live in South Africa. It is the native language in the KwaZulu Natal province where our Clyral offices are based. Since we are focussing our efforts on predominantly Zulu speaking people, we thought it would be very appropriate to adopt part of the language in our name.

In the end, Mobenzi came out on top. We combined the first half of the word ‘Mobile‘ (a little clichéd perhaps) with part of the Zulu word for ‘task or work’ which is ‘umsebenzi‘. The name therefore means ‘Mobile Work’ which we hope will help carry the concept through South Africa’s Bantu (Including other similar African languages) speaking population and will be catchy and easy enough to pronounce for others.

Today I went down into Kwanyuswa to visit the Light Providers community centre where we are considering running a pilot project in November.

Light Providers is a registered non profit organisation founded in 2005 by Vusi Kweyama, working primarily with young people in the region of KwaNyuswa. Their vision is to expose young people to their inherent potential.

They have a community centre and facilitate recreation and training programmes for youths between the ages of 10 and 28.

You can find more on the Light Providers website including a video overview.