Kefilwe Lekabe is a South African business consultant, digital skills trainer, entrepreneurship development educator and the founder of the Kefilwe Tsela Academy. She is deeply committed to education and skills development, particularly in empowering young people and improving
the lives of others.

Her colleagues and teammates describe her as a very passionate, curious, compassionate, and fantastic human to work with and learn from. She describes herself as a multi-talented person with entrepreneurship running through her veins. “I’m very passionate about education and
youth development. I like to say that I’m a person who helps other people do what they do in life”, she says.

Her entrepreneurial skills have always been a part of her, even from her childhood when she decided to go on a career day exhibition in primary school as a businesswoman, and she even had businesses from a young age. “Back in the day, we didn’t really think of it as having businesses, but looking at it through today’s lens, I saw that I had multiple businesses. I had a tuck shop back home, a dance school, and I even taught people how to model”, she says. It is clear that Kefilwe has been a teacher and an entrepreneur, which is reflected in her charging kids in her community a small amount for tutoring sessions when she was still in school. “I went to what one might consider a model-c school, and I remember learning cool and fun things, and I wanted the kids in my township to learn them as well, so I opened an afterschool program and charged them R2 for the sessions daily. The parents loved it so much. So I always knew that one day I would be doing something close to this for a living”, she says. The afterschool program Kefilwe had was undoubtedly a step toward something bigger because many years later, Kefilwe founded the Kefilwe Tsela Academy.

The Kefilwe Tsela Academy is a skills development and training company that focuses on empowering individuals and organisations through education and training to unlock and enhance entrepreneurship and vocational skills. And like every good thing, it comes with its own set of
challenges, “I always like to say to people that entrepreneurship is synonymous with challenges, but what makes an entrepreneur is that you like the challenges, you embrace them”. She explains that she’s always thinking about how to improve the academy and how to better it. “The
academy is different from what it was in 2017, but I still ask myself how we can make ourselves bigger and better. It’s very challenging because the world is always evolving; there are always new trends, skills, technologies, so how can we stay on top of that”, she explains. However, the
challenges do not take away from the joys of seeing the good the academy is doing and the achievements they get. “Last year we got one of our biggest grants. We’ve won an award as the top two innovators in education. All of those kinds of things make me believe that I am really
building something worthwhile.”, she says.

Another aspect of the academy that fills Kefilwe up with pride and joy is the e-learning platform the academy has called Bokamoso, which means “future”. “We’re got an e-learning platform that we’re working really hard to build, where learners can just hop on and learn. It’s a collaborative social learning platform.”, she says. With all the hard work Kefilwe and her team put in, the academy is well on its way to creating a significant and long-lasting legacy.
Kefilwe shares that she wants to leave behind a legacy of learning being normal. “I know it comes from a place where our great grandparents, our grandparents and even our parents not getting the opportunity to achieve these things, but I want us to get to a point where getting a
degree or opening businesses is a norm for us. Of course, getting these things is a great feat, and I want it to be a norm for us. Getting something like a quality education should be a norm for everyone, it should be a norm for all of us”, she says. With how passionate she is about
empowerment and skills development, there’s no doubt that Kefilwe is building a beautiful legacy with the academy.