‘A Cool Space’
A sprawling township about 20 miles outside central Cape Town, Khayelitsha is home to roughly a million people. More than half live in shacks. It’s here, on the second floor of a two-story brick building, that Hubspace opened the country’s first township entrepreneurship hub in 2013.
Hubspace Khayelitsha has a tidy boardroom and plenty of tea and coffee. There’s also a shared landline and a street address. In a township like Khayelitsha, these simple office perks can be game-changing for a fledgling business.
On a recent afternoon, Ayanda Cuba sat at computer inside Hubspace Khayelitsha, showing a friend what Slinch looks like. Concocted by Cuba and a partner after discussions with paramedics, Slinch is a fabricsling that fits on a stretcher and immobilizes injured children.
Like many in the room, 25-year-old Cuba has been an entrepreneur since a young age. Last year, he and a group of friends put together an online newspaper, the Times of Ulutsha, to share stories of Khayelitsha.
When a friend first brought Cuba to Hubspace, he was hooked.
“Damn,” he remembers thinking during his first visit, “this is a cool space.”
Not far from the computer where Cuba pulled up the design for Slinch, two other young men leaned back on a couch nearby, typing on laptops near a stack of business magazines. Music from a Detroit hip-hop group floats quietly from speakers through the room, muffled by large canvases on the walls with spray-painted words like “GROWTH” and “PROFIT.”…
Organikos 