Design for Development (Kaya Responsible Travel) - South Africa

Kaya Responsible Travel - South Africa

Final Report: Design for Development, Cape Town, South Africa

Through the Kellogg Institute’s new virtual internship program, I worked for eight weeks this summer as a graphic design intern for Design for Development, an organization based in Cape Town, South Africa. Although I was initially doubtful about how beneficial a remote experience would be, this opportunity has greatly improved many of my professional skills while also broadening my cultural awareness and understanding. 

Throughout the internship, I mainly worked to develop projects for Milani Youth. An outreach program of the Mountain Club of South Africa, Milani Youth brings children from the Khayelitsha township on educational hikes through local mountains to introduce them to nature and encourage their pursuit of new adventures. When I began my internship, in-person hikes were on hold due to the pandemic, and the program directors were eager for alternate activities to keep the children engaged. Meeting weekly with my supervisors to discuss ideas and receive feedback, I created and designed the graphics for two social media campaigns through the organization’s Facebook and Instagram pages. I also designed a set of “mountain etiquette” cards with rules and helpful tips to keep in mind while hiking, different certificates to be shared with the children when hikes resume, and a fundraising graphic and letter to be distributed to potential local sponsors.

In addition to Milani Youth, Design for Development also works with Manelisi’s Urban Farm, a small farmer working to share his knowledge of farming with local individuals interested in growing their own food. Although I spent most of my internship developing projects for the youth group, I was able to contribute to this project by researching best practices for capturing and spreading content and beginning to develop a centralized website to increase the accessibility and clarity of existing resources. 

Although it was not without its challenges, interning remotely with an international organization allowed me to improve many of my professional and interpersonal skills. Without the constant interaction that comes with a traditional internship, effective communication was crucial to the success of this opportunity. Accordingly, I greatly improved in my ability to draft clear and concise emails and to ask effective questions. The limited live interaction also required a lot of independent work and good time management. It was definitely challenging to keep myself focused in a home setting that was not always conducive to working, but by planning a schedule and setting my own personal deadlines, I was able to stay on track and complete all of the work that was asked of me.

Additionally, since I had originally planned on completing a different, in-person experience in South Africa, I was very excited to have the opportunity to learn more about its unique history and culture. While experiencing a country through pictures and videos is not as immersive a cultural experience as traditional travel, it still presents a great learning opportunity. Weekly culture workshops touched on topics ranging from traditional food to modern music to colloquial expressions and follow up one-on-one meetings with local ‘buddies’ allowed for a deeper discussion and understanding of these topics. One of the first discussions was about differences in South African and American work cultures. Becoming aware of these differences was extremely helpful when beginning my internship, allowing me to figure out how to get what I needed from this experience without imposing my own, limited, cultural understandings and expectations on others. 

Another topic of particular personal interest that I got to explore was South Africa’s history, specifically in relation to the interaction and classification of different racial and ethnic groups. As a biracial person, I am extremely interested in how this dynamic plays out in other countries with a deeply divided racial history, and I enjoyed learning more about the context in South Africa. In short, being mixed has its privileges in any white supremacist society, but in South Africa, these privileges were written into the law as a way to further divide the non-white majority and ensure the white minority remained in power.  Since whites were the majority in the United States, they did not need to legally divide the relatively small mixed and Black populations. Instead, mixed, or light-skin privilege came as a sort of societal side effect of white supremacist ideologies. 

Unfortunately, despite these injustices being classified as ‘history’, their legacy remains with various long-standing effects. One area these effects are glaringly apparent in is education. Following a cultural workshop, I was able to discuss and compare my public education in the United States with that of my buddy's in South Africa. I shared that, in my experience, African history was rarely highlighted or talked about beyond the context of the slave trade, and I was surprised to hear that she did not learn too much about Africa in school either, despite being born and raised on the continent itself. Her history lessons were more focused on world history (i.e. European/American history) and she did not begin to learn more about her ethnic history and culture until she began to explore it for herself, a sentiment I have also felt in regard to my own education. Although it is not often focused upon, understanding and feeling connected to one’s own culture and history is just as important as knowing the dates and alliances of the World Wars, maybe even more so. In the United States, this lack of information often causes a disconnect between Black Americans and the country as a whole, and sometimes leads to fractures within the Black community itself. As recent events have highlighted, this division is still present and will remain so until the history we are taught and the culture that is deemed acceptable allows for a more inclusive assertion of identity and alliance.

As an architecture major with a minor in Africana studies, I am extremely grateful that I was able to participate in this internship. I was able to practice my design skills, improve my professional interactions, and explore a new culture and history of particular interest. As the world settles into its new normal, I hope to complete future work and research in South Africa, and I am excited to put all of the skills and knowledge gained in this virtual experience into practice.