Prize-winning bread.

Many young people in today's South Africa are uneducated and thus unemployable. This is because revolution was given priority over education during the anti-apartheid struggle.

Rev Spiwo Xapile, a minister of the Reformed Presbyterian Church of South Africa in Guguletu, near Cape Town, decided to do something about the need. He and Jan Du Toit, a professor in the Department of Industrial Psychology at the University of Stellenbosch, set about creating a centre on the church grounds to train people in various craft skills. He enlisted voluntary help from qualified people, and the army provided and constructed classrooms made from steel containers.

They started with R32,000 donated by Absa Bank after Xapile (who is also a church historian and registered doctoral student at Stellenbosch) spoke at a meeting arranged by one of Du Toit's students.

The JL Zwane Training Centre at Guguletu opened in 1994 to train young people in a wide variety of skills, from paving to hairdressing. No course lasts longer than 21 days and all are free. Six women from Guguletu were also trained as caterers and are now responsible for most of the catering at the Centre.

University students come to the centre to help 80 primary school children with their homework. The children are even provided with lunch.

The success of this centre led to a request to help create a similar one in Malungeni, Xapile's hometown in the former Transkei. Unemployment among the men there was rife due to retrenched workers returning from their former places of employment, as well as alcohol and lack of training. But there was one advantage; the women's enthusiasm.

Prof Du Toit arranged for a donation to train three members of the Malungeni community as poultry farmers at Stellenbosch. These people now plough their knowledge back into the community.

15,000 trees and fences donated by the Department of Forestry in the Eastern Cape were erected and plantations are being tended, especially by the women.

In another project that is a part of the school feeding programme instituted by President Mandela, women at Malungeni started baking bread in traditional baking ovens and selling it to the local school. The school gets cheap and fresh bread while the women make a profit too.

This project (jointly organized by the University of Stellenbosch and the JL Zwane Training Centre) has won the State President's Award for Community Initiative.

When the Cabinet Minister for Rural Development opened the training centre at Malungeni she acknowledged that the work had been completed far more quickly than the government could possibly have done it. Today at Malungeni there are a multipurpose hall, six classrooms, four offices, two toilets, a kitchen and accommodation for visitors such as staff from the Department of Manpower who provide training.

All the labour came from the community itself. `At Malungeni', says Xapile, `we have dealt with incompetence and laziness, a bigger problem for South Africa than crime. People here are motivated and their success spells it.'