Powered by a dedication to social justice and an aptitude for creative communications, Amantle Kanyuchi has traced an interesting path through the South African civil society sector. This path has been shaped by her intuition, prototyping, innovation and networking – traits that she has come to recognise and nourish over time. The DGMT Innovation Fellowship, which she completed in 2020, helped her to recognise these traits and blend them together to develop her own trajectory.
The importance of roots
Amantle was raised by her mother in Mafikeng. In addition to working and raising a family, Amantle’s mom helped those around her. “Growing up, my Mom was always helping someone – whether it was transport money for a child at the farm or helping a woman get her identity document,” she recalls.
Amantle credits her mother’s altruism with her own choice to go into the nonprofit sector. “Only later in life, I realised that this is what sparked my interest,” she says, “and looking back, everything is about the empowerment of women for me.”
The importance of prototyping and learning from failure
Having completed high school in Pretoria, Amantle enrolled with Cape Peninsula University of Technology to study Architecture.
“Fortunately,” Amantle says with a smile, “I failed my major.” This ‘failure’ meant that Amantle was unable to qualify as an architect and led to her taking a job as a draftsperson which, in turn, led to her realising that she did not want to pursue a career in architecture at all.
Amantle knew her strengths lay in creativity and visual communications. She wrote a long email to her mother explaining her plan to drop out of Architecture and start a Bachelor of Arts in Marketing Communication at AAA School of Advertising. The failure in her Architecture degree turned out to be critically important to her own life path. “In the past, I used to think that I must excel at everything. But now I appreciate what you master through failure. I now have a positive association with failure; it is a positive opportunity to learn. Learning means I can get better at something.” In 2011, Amantle graduated in Marketing Communication, completing it in record time and succeeding at marketing competitions.
“Looking back, if I had passed everything, I would have just pushed forward in architecture without reflecting or asking myself what I wanted … through this I learnt that you can determine what you really want through trying things out.”
This was Amantle prototyping: a process that has become important to her work – and something that would be illuminated by the Innovation Fellowship years later. “Through the Innovation Fellowship, I came to appreciate prototyping: you have to start small, test it, see if it works … and iterate. That way, you find the right way.”
The importance of intuition
In 2017, Amantle found a seemingly random course on Social Entrepreneurship and Systems Change convened by the Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Cape Town. “It did not seem to make sense for me to do this course, but I just knew I wanted to do it. I took a week off from work, booked a flight and an Airbnb and I went.”
As soon as Amantle arrived in Cape Town and started the course, she understood why her intuition led her there. “When I arrived, I just knew. I just knew that this was right.”
Following graduation, Amantle blended her two interests in social change and marketing in becoming the Campaigns Manager at Harambee – a not-for-profit social enterprise that works with partners to find solutions for the challenge of youth unemployment.
“Harambee was the kitchen for me,” explains Amantle, “allowing me to experiment and fuse my creativity and social justice interests,” she explains. During Covid lockdown, Amantle helped to spark innovative ways to remain connected such as Brunch Hangouts, connecting young people using live interviews during lockdown. “It sounded like a crazy idea launching Brunch Hangouts by “borrowing the cool” from celebrity friends and using their personal stories to keep youth inspired in the middle of lockdown, but I said, I think it will work – and it did!”
The importance of processes
During her time at Harambee, Amantle enrolled in the DGMT Innovation Fellowship. Over the course of the Fellowship, Fellows explore a challenge set by their organisation that requires an innovative solution. This innovation question forms the basis of a case study throughout the 12 month learning programme that allows Fellows to try out tools and techniques, practice skills and test concepts of innovation using a real world scenario.
Amantle and her colleague Ignatius Ferreira explored how to expand Harambee’s Mobi Site (an online page for youth) into a more wide-reaching platform. Once back at Harambee after attending in person immersions with the rest of their cohort, they helped to develop what is now the National Pathway Manager – an online platform linking young people to jobs through platforms like the Department of Labour’s Employment Services of South Africa and the SA Youth network. This has been a key tool in getting young people into job opportunities.
Through the Fellowship, Amantle deepened her understanding of processes to explore ideas and improvements in the civil society work sphere. “Some of the concepts we learnt at the Fellowship – like holding focus groups – were useful here,” she explains. “We would come back [to Harambee from the Fellowship] with learnings, and we related it to this process [of building the National Pathway Manager].”
It was also the importance of process that led Amantle to found her own organisation, and develop it through reflection processes. Amantle understood that somewhere along her journey she had to start her own project – and focus it on her main interest of women empowerment.
In 2024, Amantle founded She Empowers Afrika, which specialises in cross-sector partnerships to nurture and upskill female entrepreneurs from under-resourced and marginalised communities on the African continent.
Even as she built She Empowers Afrika, the importance of process again appeared. She learned that sometimes progress means pausing. Currently, She Empowers Afrika is in a state of pause; which is no bad thing. “I realised that I need to pause. I want to reflect on why I have started this, and I want to refocus it on marginal and rural communities,” she explains. “I want to find the ‘why’ better,” she says. “In hindsight, I can see that what I am doing with She Empowers Afrika is exactly what we explored in the Fellowship. It is processing. I need to dig deeper.”
Concurrent to this, Amantle is currently completing her Masters in MPhil in Inclusive Innovation at UCT, and her thesis topic is no surprise: ‘Mentorship expectations differences across generations: A study of South African Black women’.
Whilst this reflection period takes place around She Empowers Afrika, Amantle has taken directorship at Affritude Communications, a creative agency that pioneered the LED stage trucks in South Africa; a breakthrough that reshaped public engagement by delivering vital health communications during the 2020 lockdown. These trucks are specifically used in outreach projects and health promotion – such as a recent collaboration with UNICEF. Affritude Communications featured in the Bill Gates Heroes in the Field newsletter, highlighting the role of innovative solutions in advancing health and education initiatives.
The importance of networking
For Amantle, the main legacy of the Innovation Fellowship is the network of Alumni. “The main thing that the Fellowship gave me is network”, she explains. “Even now, we have carved a niche in the social impact space and we are connecting.” The network has assisted her in developing her own trajectory, too: “people are generous with sharing connections,” she says, “and they are generous in pointing you to the right path.”
The importance of reflecting in order to move forward
The next steps for Amantle will be guided by an ever-clarifying set of tools – from processing and networking to reflecting and trusting intuition. Linking one’s own skills and strengths and learning from reflections all bind together to push someone to the next step in their career, and further impact the wider sector around them. “Because,” says Amantle, “you have to observe and learn from how, in your life’s path, the dots keep connecting.”