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It gives us great pleasure to inform you of the build and launch of a Media and Technology Hub officially known as “eHub Diepsloot” funded by Ericsson. On Friday, 23 June 2017 from 10:00 – 13:00 community stakeholders, media personnel and Ericsson team members will join us for the official launch! Located on 7184 Peach Road in Extension 10 (opposite the Ext 5 Taxi Rank), this 244m2 containerised facility is built on the same property as the Father Louis Blondel Centre (hereafter referred to as FLBC).

eHub Diepsloot and FLBC are both managed by The Wot-if? Trust, currently servicing 47 small businesses and 13 organisations. Our focus areas are Enterprise and Supplier Development, Women’s Empowerment, Youth Development, Greening/Agriculture with emphasis placed on the use and power of Media and Technology. eHub Diepsloot: An extension of the FLBC facility which is built as an Open Collaborative Workspace, since 2013.

The Wot-If? Trust prides itself on joining forces with members of the Diepsloot community towards a vision for the future known as Diepsloot 2030. To ask what kind of Diepsloot we want to learn, live and work-in by the year 2030 and guide us “Together for a Brighter Future”. We facilitate that engagement, admin and action. With Implementation Partners such as Ericsson, we also facilitate the funding to Participants who actively partake in the programmes and projects we run. Not purely to considered in a welfare mentality of being “beneficiaries”.

Annually, The Wot-If? Trust has attracted 200 – 250 guests to this stakeholder event that usually involves dialogues, LEGO Serious Play, drumming, storytelling, hackathons, panel discussions, planting trees and keynote speeches amongst others. This year was particularly different because the Social Good Summit programme included a Global Goals Jam. Much like the Social Good Summit, this two-day-event is hosted in participating countries and The Wot-If? Trust, once again represented Africa by being the only official host in South Africa, alongside Design Hub Kampala in Uganda.
As an international standard for the Global Goals Jam, designers, creatives, coders and programmers come together to create short term interventions that will have a long term impact in contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals (better known as the SDGs) which are relevant to their local communities. The Global Goals Jam has short design sprints with a specially designed toolkit/design methods to encourage creative thinking.
In Diepsloot, with every hotly debated idea taken into consideration, one idea stood out from the rest – “The Good Man Project”. A crucial, current, social topic of discussion is that there are no longer good men in our society. The systematic nature of patriarchy has set a stigma and standard for most men. Some men go along with this regressive normality as they are already labelled. However, there are still some good men that need recognition with their contribution to this project by being showcased. The first step for this project is to compile a survey asking what they think are the qualities of a good man. Thereafter, good men (and young boys) will be highlighted as role models to the community. This is but one example of the exciting work that The Wot-If? Trust engage in and support.