Lide Ibali: The WhatsApp Channel Giving Youth a Fighting Chance

Fefekazi Mavuso didn’t wait for government. She made a way, and over 600 young people follow it each week.

Fefekazi Mavuso, a 2016 Activator and UCT development practitioner, has a problem with how we connect young people to opportunities in South Africa. And she’s done something about it.

“I noticed people on social media putting opportunities on platforms with links to websites, but these weren’t direct links to the actual companies,” says the 2016 Activator from Cape Town. “If you’re young and buying data, how many clicks do you need just to submit your CV? By the time you find the actual link, you’ve used 35 megabytes of data.”

For many, Fefekazi is simply someone working in UCT’s development sector who examined existing job-seeking mechanisms and deemed them inadequate. So often, we wait for policy discussions and interventions to trickle down – but not her. For Fefekazi, the driving question has always been: what are we going to do about it right now?

Having worked in the development space since 2015, first in early childhood development at DGMT and then in civil society development, she reflects on what she observed. “I worked for a funder, and I had access to all this information. I knew there’s money in circulation and people offering it, but young people lack the language and alignment to match themselves to opportunities.”

After years of informally sharing opportunities with her Activate network, watching too many young people struggle with basic access issues, she decided to take on the problem directly. Initially just forwarding opportunities via email and WhatsApp groups, she later pivoted to something more systematic – teaching herself how to streamline access while eliminating the barriers she kept seeing.

The result? A WhatsApp channel called Lide Ibali (The Journey is Long), launched in 2024. “When I find opportunities, I make sure it’s cleaned up. One click and you go straight to the opportunity. Then I put them on WhatsApp because that’s where people are.”

Lide Ibali Channel

The WhatsApp channel reaches over 600 people with everything from entry-level internships to executive positions, scholarships to skills training – all vetted and presented with direct links. “It goes from entry level internship right up to executive level. Anyone and anything that you might be looking for is available there,” Fefekazi explains.

But what she discovered through this work broke her heart. “Young people and the people around them don’t see themselves in the opportunities available. People are not well-informed about careers, about trajectories.” The problem isn’t just access to information – it’s about seeing yourself as worthy of the opportunity in the first place.

“Someone goes to TVET college for office management but doesn’t understand what happens after N6, where they should aim to work, who they should target for stepping stones,” she says. The skills gap, she realized, goes far deeper than technical competencies.

“Too many young people, whether educated or not, are just not equipped with emotional intelligence to navigate the workspace. How do you conduct yourself? If you’re sick, who do you report to? Do you just go missing?” The channel works, but it also revealed the deeper challenge: young people collecting opportunities but lacking the soft skills to convert them into sustainable employment.

Challenges

The deeper Fefekazi immersed herself in this work, the more weighed down she became. “I get so frustrated to see that there’s information everywhere but young people don’t see themselves doing this work,” she says.

“I’ll give you an example,” she says, describing someone who joins a TVET college after matric with average marks. “They get accepted, they get NSFAS, they do office management, they do the NQF-rated courses. The first opportunity they get, they earn R5,000. But this person hasn’t placed themselves in a career space. They haven’t engaged with this job as a way to say, in the next five years, where can I go with this?”

As time progressed, she began to see a pattern – she could almost always predict who would take advantage of an opportunity and who would not.

The issue, she realized, is internal work. “Young people lack self-worth, and it doesn’t help that we come from broken families and broken communities. Poverty really takes away your ability to dream and your ability to see further.”

“Every person has a journey that has been long coming, of struggle, perseverance. Although each person’s journey is long, it doesn’t need to end there. The question is, where am I taking my story?”

That philosophy shapes everything about how the channel operates, and Fefekazi has bigger plans.

Building Beyond the Channel

As far as engagement goes, Fefekazi’s approach is unconventional. Her goal isn’t simply to find people who want opportunities, but also to find people who understand the work. “If you’re a first-generation graduate, then that’s what you offer to your siblings, cousins, family,” she says. “We have to go beyond just sharing opportunities on WhatsApp.”

She sees Lide Ibali moving beyond WhatsApp. “My vision is to offer coaching to NGOs, coaching to young people in spaces like Activate. We really do need stronger school-to-work readiness pipelines and informal mentorship that can offer emotional readiness, EQ – whatever it is.”

The consultancy side will take shape in the next phase of her journey. “I have skills in the NGO space and the development space. At the ground level, I’ll continue to provide opportunities for as long as I can. But the consultancy – that’s where we can scale the impact.”

It’s about creating what she calls “emotional readiness” – helping young people navigate job applications, but also the psychological barriers that keep them from seeing themselves as deserving of opportunities.

Results

The impact is clear, even if it’s hard to quantify. “I truly hope that the platform grows only through people getting access to information. I’ve seen people get scholarships, bursaries. That actually affirms a lot to me,” she says.

Additionally, she shares that the real measure isn’t just placements – it’s mindset shifts. “If it can impact one person, she’s going to help out where she can or where he can,” she reflects. For every person who takes an opportunity seriously, who sees themselves differently, who shares with someone else – that is the ripple effect she’s building toward.

For each win, there are always challenges. “I often do that with a lot of other people, and then the person doesn’t bother. Then I think, okay, is it again, this young people thing?” she says, describing the frustration of sharing opportunities that go ignored.

The emotional exhaustion is real. “There’s general exhaustion and general discouragement as a country, in homes, in communities,” she observes. It’s not just individual apathy – it’s systemic fatigue that affects everyone, from parents to young people themselves.

In the absence of a formal team or dedicated funding, scaling beyond individual connections can be challenging. Unlike structured programmes with staff and budgets, Fefekazi runs Lide Ibali while working full-time.

“What I’m doing is very little, but what I told myself is that if it can impact one person, she’s going to help out where she can.”

But this raises a pressing question – how do you grow something rooted in personal care and intention? Lide Ibali quietly outperforms impersonal job boards and multi-click platforms by maintaining its human touch.

Conclusion

As we mark another International Youth Skills Day, Fefekazi’s message to young South Africans is hopeful: “We cannot change how things must be done if we want to improve as a country. If young people in 1976 refused to speak Afrikaans because they knew that language was powerful enough, what do you mean? We are demeaning the power and impact that young people actually have.”

My emphasis, like Fefe’s, is on agency over despondency. Limitations and opportunities exist concurrently. To say we are without hope would be dishonest. Week in and week out, opportunities exist – and it is high time we do the hard thing of using what we have.

Through Fefe’s story, I’m reminded that change is not always in the conferences and big panel discussions that issue the big decisions, but in the ground workers like Fefe – hidden, but just as impactful.

I share her frustration. When I send opportunities to people I care about – free training, virtual, flexible – it’s not just that they don’t respond. It’s that when I mention it verbally, it sounds like something died inside of them. And I don’t know how to help with that hopelessness.

We may be overwhelmed by limitations, but every opportunity we share – even one – is a refusal to give up. As Fefe shared, we cannot police how people live, but we can plant what grows.

Follow the Lide.Ibali_Co channel on WhatsApp: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029Vaea2IZBqbr3Eh3UtH3W

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About the Author:

Aphelele Mtwecu is a content writer, activist, and creative force passionate about youth development, transformation, and social impact. She is deeply committed to advocating for mental health and working to remove the stigma around mental health. She is also committed to creating more safe spaces for young people to engage. As a 2016 Activator and member of the ACTIVATE! Change Drivers writer’s hub, Aphelele uses her writing to inspire and advocate for positive change.