It is with tremendous pleasure that we announce a newly signed contract with MyMachine South Africa. MyMachine South Africa is successfully established a few years back in collaboration with our partner, The Initiative for Community Advancement (ICA). As of today, MyMachine South Africa will be a close collaboration between ICA and Open Design Afrika (ODA).
ICA is a Community Foundation that strongly believes in community philanthropy in rural communities through empowering the community to take the lead and contribute to their own development and shaping their own futures. In short, ICA’s vision is to help facilitate the development of communities that are vibrant, sustainable and resilient, with unlimited opportunities.
ODA is a not-for-profit company and social enterprise that strongly believes in collaborative creative intelligence as a superpower and that every child and citizen should have the right to develop it. This they believe, will enable and empower everyone to confidently contribute to the design of a future world that we can all feel proud to live, work and play in.
Through various collaborative projects and its annual festival, ODA creates accessible opportunities and inclusive creative experiences for people from all walks of life. Through the integration of creativity, play, making, storytelling and collaboration, these engaging experiences are mindfully shaped to inspire and develop future-making life skills, hope and new aspirations for their own futures in all who want to participate – children, the youth, educators, parents and entrepreneurs.
And as aspiring change-makers, they learn that if we ALL plant small seeds of change everywhere then our collective impact will be massive. ODA demonstrates why creative intelligence is a superpower and how it can be used to democratise participation and to design for change, for life and for well-being so that everything we design and develop in our manmade world can create conditions that are conducive to life for our children, their offspring and for the planet.
ODA is also one of the driving forces to advance the transformation of education from STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) to STEAMD (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Math and Design Thinking) in South Africa.
As a new collaborative partnership, Jeremy Maarman, Founder & CEO of ICA, and Suné Stassen, Founder & CEO of ODA, aim to roll out MyMachine in the Province of the Western Cape from 2023 before it will strategically and gradually start rolling it out in other provinces and across the rest of South African schools. Dream Machines from each year will also be exhibited at the ODA festivals, where the young inventors of these machines will be invited to share their ideas with their peers and with a broader audience.
Thank you so much to Jeremy and Suné for engaging in this exciting and super powerful partnership! We can’t wait to meet the new students and the ideas they will elaborate in the new school year starting in January 2023, and all the following years !
