08/11/2017

It’s been almost 2 weeks since my last blog and a lot has happened since then: site visits to businesses in Townships, meetings with Tshepo 1M partners and a scheduled and then cancelled meeting with the Premier.

Tomorrow is our presentation and final recommendations to our client, the Tshepo 1M team/Province of Gauteng. We have been driving to add value and bring new ideas and possible solutions to the table through this 4 week consulting program and we are confident our client will be satisfied with the outcome.

During week 3, we had the opportunity to visit a small business located in Diepsloot, a township in northern Johannesburg. Diepsloot, home to ~400k people, like most townships, has important infrastructure and transport challenges that we witnessed first hand.

Even with so many challenges, the Township economy is buzzing and is one that still needs to be untapped by the established corporations and enterprises, linking and creating new business opportunities. This was made clear in our visit to a thriving businness in the heart of Diepsloot, this business identified a need (demand) within the township and has now addressed it (supply), banking on the opportunities that the township marketplace has to offer.

Although history may differ significantly, South Africa’s townships, which mostly surged during Apartheid, are similar in many ways to Mexico’s segregated areas, as many of the same challenges affect it’s inhabitants (infrastructure, education, violence, etc.). This means that reccomendations done here can very well be proposed and implemented in Mexico.

Last weekend we had our comunity service day. We partnered with a school that is focusing on preparing South African township teens in coding, programming, gaming, robotics and other emerging technologies. Our goal was to develop and inspire the youths on topics such as entrepreneurship, innovation and leadership.

I was taken aback by their energy and cleverness at such young age.

In just a couple of days I will be saying goodbye to Joburg.

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Its been over 1 week in Johannesburg. Our hotel is in the heart of Joburg’s Central Banking District, in an area called Braamfontein (Braamie). The area is amazing, it has a very 80’s feel to it.

My Subteam has been assigned to work with the Tshepo 1Million initiative. The project’s objective, like the name may indicate, is to provide work opportunities to 1 Million youths accross the Gauteng province.

Youth unemployment is concentrared heavily in areas called Townships. These townships, in their majority, were formed during the Apartheid era, where black people were displaced from their homes and moved into segregated areas on the outskirts of the cities, often growing into huge settlements with no proper planning nor infrastructure. Present day townships hold many challenges for their inhabitants.

We, the IBM CSC subteam, will be providing recommendations on how AI, Data Science and other Anlytics technologies can help with the end goal of the T1M program.

During our first week, we held several meetings with the T1M Director to understand the overal situation.

We have also been working with the IBM Research | Africa team who have kindly taken time out of their hectic schedules to help us out with additional information we have been requesting.

I am very impressed with the Resarch team, their capabilities, knowledge and eagerness to help. The offices, which are not in the Sandton main IBM building, but in the heart of Braamie, are amazing and just a few blocks away from our hotel.

Week 2 is now underway, promissing to be interesting and full of information as we have several meetings scheduled this week with various stakeholders and partners of the program.

The past weekend was incredible, we got to visit the cradle of humankind and a Lion Park, which was basically a mini-safari experience.

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Even though we’ve been in Joburg for just a few days we all feel it’s been a few months, but not in a bad way… I think we’ve just done so many different things and packed so much in just 3 days that it feels like so much more.

Day 3 was packed as we got to meet our clients and introduce our projects to top officials of the Joburg municipality and local press.

I had the honour to make the introduction on behalf of my sub team, which is obviosly a challenge as the officials present have been involved in the program long before we did.

I’ll talk more about our project on future blogs, and once we get clearance to talk about it through this format.

The sub team I was assigned to is conformed of Preethi (India, Cloud Platform), Matt (Australia, Cloud architecht), Kathleen (Canada, Bid Manager) and myself. They are all incredibly knowledgeable of their respective areas and are great fun to be around.

We have been working with Shane Radford (Media & Entertainment Industry Leader for MEA), who has been orienting and introducing the program to us, pointing out it’s challenges and guiding us towards the right direction for us to get started.

We will also be collaborating with Researchers from the IBM SA lab who will be involved in the project over the next few weeks.

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I went to college in Mexico and dorm rooms/buildings for students aren’t that common. However, I would imagine this is what it would feel like (minus the excesive drinking and 10 years older). I am saying this because the hotel booked the 14 of us into the same floor! That had never happened to me before, usually we get rooms in different floors when on business travel. So for example, this morning Rama and a few others were practicing Yoga 2 doors down, I bumped into Suzanna at the gym at 6am and then, a while ago, while on my way to iron the shirt Ill wear tomorrow, chatted with Matt and Kathleen who were having some kind of tech issues with a laptop.

We were joking that we look like a fraternity.

Anyways, tomorrow we will get to meet some of our clients and officially begin with our projects. We are all very excited!!

P.s. Today we visited Apartheid Museum and Soweto (which stands for South Western Township). So much history in this magnificent nation.

South Africa is a long way from Mexico, believe me I should know after my 45 hour journey from door to door.

I had a planned, long, layover of 11 hours in Sao Paulo, but turned out to be a total of 17 as my flight got delayed. We boarded the plane right on schedule, I even fell asleep shortly after boarding as I didn’t really get much sleep the night before (Mex — Brazil flight). But after 1 hour and a half of the plane not moving, the pilot told us we needed to disembark due to bad weather conditions during our planned route. Needless to say, no one was very happy.

Fast forward 5 hours and we were boarding again and on our way to joburg.

I was very happy when I finally arrived, cleared immigration and on my way to the hotel.

I met right away with Earl and Kathleen, CSC teammates, at the hotel’s roof top bar. It has a magnificent view of the city!

We ended friday (10/13) by going out to dinner at a great place that had a great DJ, he played the sax live and played a variety of different music including, to my amusement, Marc Anthony and other spanish/latin songs… I felt at home!

Today (10/14) we had a briefing with a few IBM ZA Execs, were they talked about IBMs business and strategy in the country. It was very enlightning to get background on the economical challenges facing the country as well, which will help us in understanding and putting perspective to our different CSC projects.

I am excited to be joining a team of 15 IBMers from all over the world (Argentina, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Mexico, Slovakia and USA) deploying to South Africa as part of the IBM Corporate Service Corps (CSC) program.

The CSC program sends groups of IBMers with different skills, backgrounds and cultures to emerging markets to perform community-driven economic development projects.

[More on the CSC Program]

[Other CSC Articles]

My flight to Johannesburg departs in just 10 days, with a good 39 hours from door to door (Guadalajara to Joburg).

I applied and got accepted to the CSC program in the summer of 2016 but received the deployment email during June 2017, one year later. This is a fairly funny story, I was actually on vacation when I received the deployment notification, so I ended up reading the email 1 day after the deadline for me to confirm and receive approval from my manager. Imagine my face when I saw the deadline had come and gone without me knowing, I ended up contacting the CSC program manager via the CSC Facebook group (lol). Needless to say, it turned out fine.

After gathering paperwork, getting a yellow fever shot (South African requirement for entering the country because my flight itinerary has a layover in Sao Paulo), receiving my SA visa and, most importantly, gone through a 3 month orientation, I am ready to meet my teammates (in person) and clients in amazing South Africa.

Over the course of the deployment I will be posting blogs a couple times per week, recording my journey with the help of photos and videos. I invite you to follow along, ask questions and add comments.

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1 Week (or so) to go! was originally published in #IBMCSC South Africa 18 Team on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.