BY NONHLANHLA MKHABELA
MBABANE – Chester to offer job opportunities to young people in Eswatini especially those in the media field.
Chestersment Maphalala is one of the winners of Media Hackathon who won yesterday at Sandton in Johannesburg event which was hosted by the Youth Media Literacy Program. The young liswati is a recent graduate in Journalism and Mass Communication class of 2021 and the founder of Tertiary Hub, an online publication which is a news platform concentrating on the students in tertiary institutions. The aim of the hub is to help students voice out things that are affecting them. The Youth Media Literacy Program hosted a two-day regional in-person Hackathon, from the 15th to 16th of November 2022. This regional event brought together young innovators, journalism students, civic activists and content creators to face off in a winner-takes-all competitive Hackathon.
Chestersment scooped the first prize together with Ramarara Joyce from Lesotho. The competing countries were Eswatini, Botswana, Lesotho and South Africa. Five of emaSwati qualified to the top 8, those were; Chester Maphalala, Muzi Bhembe, Celumusa Thusi, Fezile Mnguni and Gugulethu Mahlalela. The two winners came on top among other participants from SADC Region and each received prize monies of $10 000 [about E173 146] and seat funding. The seat funding means that they will be writing applications and the Media Hackathon team will help them set up the platform and help cover the costs for a period of 4 months. In these months, there will be a lot of training and mentorship so that they can stand on their feet and start generating revenue.
When reached for comment, Maphalala stated that he is not only bringing knowledge home but also job opportunities for young journalist students of Eswatini. This imply to the University of Eswatini and Limkokwing students. He added that the payment will not be a hefty one but enough to sustain them. According to Chester, this is one innovative way to reduce unemployment rate and they will be starting with a small team but hoping that in the next 10 years, more people will be hired.
“This is an opportunity for emaSwati but it is a changing one person’s life at a time as we are still trying to stand on the ground. This is a big concept for me especially winning against super smart people, it was a very tight competition but I am a thrilled to have made it through. I was really praying that I make it to the top 8 and I did. The travelling was fine but the challenging part was that I have to compete with smart folks like the Eswatini Coding School. It was nerve-wrecking seeing the judges who have been with the SABC” he stated.
