entrepreneur business tv

Pictured in the new Digi Central / Success TV Durban studios are stakeholders involved in The Entrepreneur’s Journey, Vince Ngubane: DigiTV cameraman, Jesse Greaves: City Story, Samkelo Ntetha of Success TV and seated in front, Winston Owen of DigiCentral.

Free online TV entrepreneurship help to fight joblessness

A new free weekly TV series that will be aired online twice a week offers aspiring entrepreneurs valuable business support.

entrepreneur business tv

Pictured in the new Digi Central / Success TV Durban studios are stakeholders involved in The Entrepreneur’s Journey, Vince Ngubane: DigiTV cameraman, Jesse Greaves: City Story, Samkelo Ntetha of Success TV and seated in front, Winston Owen of DigiCentral.

Against the backdrop of devastating youth unemployment, poverty and lack of purpose, a collaboration of Durban-based innovators have launched a new TV show to support emerging micro-entrepreneurs in creating and growing their small businesses.

 The civic unrest and its aftermath experienced in KZN over the past few weeks has shone the spotlight on the enormous frustrations, impatience, challenges and rage which many of South Africa’s young people are feeling. 

Long-term solutions are complex, expensive and difficult – especially in such a politically-problematic society.

City Story, an inclusive project-based urban renewal collective, with partners including 20/20 Vision Foundation, Domino Business and Faith at Work, have created The Entrepreneur’s Journey, an educational video series aimed to support small business people, by explaining basic helpful tips and principles.

Written by Leah Sloman, the story follows two enterprising youngsters: Andile (Zamakuhle Jali, AKA TJ) and Sitandiswe (Phanaso Myeza) and their quest to start and grow their own small business. In the process, they are mentored by an experienced businessman, played by Terence Ronald, the founder of Value Added Lifestyle Training (VALT). In each episode, Terence mentors them in navigating often-encountered pitfalls.

When watching the videos for the first time, Winston Owen of the DigiCentral Group of companies realised that there were great potential synergies. Owen forwarded the first two videos to Samkelo Ntetha, Owner of SuccessTV, suggesting that he consider flighting the videos on the SuccessTV channel. Success TV (Pty) Ltd. is the Durban-based, black youth owned company behind the black youth focussed digital television channel, SuccessTV.  Ntetha immediately gave Owen the go-ahead to speak to City Story to discuss a collaborative relationship.

City Story was positive about the proposed collaboration. The videos needed a large and relevant audience pool.  Enter SpesRes. With roughly 20,000 learners on their books, studying New Venture Creation, SpesRes is arguably one of the largest entrepreneurial educational specialist companies in South Africa.  Because the SpesRes learning programme is delivered digitally, it was a simple task to link the video material from the SpesRes learning platform – a free online video on-demand channel – to SuccessTV.

Winston Owen believes the youth unemployment crisis is a ‘ticking time bomb’ and as a result, there is a sense of urgency to this campaign. 

“These past few weeks have reminded us that youth unemployment can no longer be ignored. It is even more of a concern if those unemployed youths are tertiary institution graduates.”

“This project has been close to my heart: as a young black entrepreneur myself it has been amazing to be part of this process, and I truly believe that the City Story content will help to fast-track the businesses of pro-active young business people out there,” Success TV’s Samkelo Ntetha said.

There is a lot of commitment and passion among the collaborators to implement contemporary, digital solutions to the harrowing unemployment figures. 

“We are hugely excited about the far-reaching potential of this collaboration. City Story, SuccessTV, SpesRes, Digi Central and their various stakeholders, funders and associates are able to reach literally hundreds of thousands of young South Africans and empower them to become mindful entrepreneurs and contributing citizens of South Africa,” Owen said.

“The stories that we have heard from SpesRes learners and viewers of SuccessTV have convinced us that we are involved in true empowerment. We would like to invite more collaboration, because there is still plenty of room on the (digital) bus,” he added.

 Episodes of The Entrepreneur’s Journey are being uploaded every Tuesday and Thursday.

They are free to view at www.successtv.co.za.