2016 Mandela Washington Fellow: Andile Bonginhlanhla Dube

Andile Bonginhlanhla Dube, Founder and Creative Director, Young Hustla Initiative, South Africa

Andile Bonginhlanhla Dube was troubled by the high levels of unemployment among young people in his home country, South Africa, where the educational system encouraged job seeking rather than job creation.

“Our society thinks that we need to encourage kids to go to school and get jobs, but the fundamental thing that we forget is if everyone is going to look for jobs, who is actually creating these jobs?” says Andile.

The concept of job creation was one of the major driving forces in his founding of the Young Hustla Initiative, where he and his team teach classes on entrepreneurship and business to underprivileged and previously disadvantaged young people and their communities. They feel that many young people have lost their sense of purpose and that young people need a “helping hand” to discover their true potential.

As a part of the Young Hustla Initiative, Andile and his team design and create entrepreneurial educational teaching tools, specifically educational comic books, to make entrepreneurship more engaging and relatable for young people.

“We want to inspire kids to follow their dreams,” says Andile.

The comic book, Young Hustla, follows the story of several aspiring young South African entrepreneurs who are all from different socioeconomic backgrounds. The story depicts the journey of entrepreneurship from pre-startup, start-up, and expansion. While the first issue of Young Hustla focused on South Africa, subsequent issues of Young Hustla will expand to include other parts of Africa in order to have the whole of Africa represented and communicating in one voice about the future of entrepreneurship. Currently, the second issue of the comic book is in the illustration phase.

In addition to his work with the Young Hustla Initiative, Andile is also a member of the Presidential Youth Working Group, where he helps advise government ministers and the president of South Africa on policies relating to youth. He describes his role in the working group as being “on the ground” and “bridging the gap between government and young people.”

By doing the Mandela Washington Fellowship, Andile hoped to gain transformational knowledge and build up his professional network, where he can have the right minds helping him with his current projects. For him, the fellowship is also about learning, applying the knowledge, and imparting the knowledge to the rest of the people back home. Looking specifically at entrepreneurship, he wants to move young people away from the entrepreneurship education in South Africa that teaches the theory of entrepreneurship rather than practicality of it. Upon completing his fellowship, Andile plans to immediately return to South Africa and incorporate course content from the fellowship into the entrepreneurship classes that he teaches.

2016 was Dartmouth’s third summer as a Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI) host for a cohort of Mandela Washington Fellows. On campus, the program is a collaboration between the Dickey Center for International Understanding, the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences, the Dartmouth Center for Service, the Thayer School of Engineering, the Outdoor Programs Office, and the Dartmouth Entrepreneurial Network (DEN).


- Submitted by Rachel Favors ’18, Rockefeller Center Student Program Assistant for Communications