Two young entrepreneurs have developed a mobile app called CareRott to provide school learners and university students mentorship. CareRott connects high school students, especially those from disadvantaged areas, with student mentors at universities. The entrepreneurs hope to give others the guidance they did not receive to help prepare for and navigate university. They have received support through the Telkom FutureMakers program to help launch their venture.

1. Mentoring app preps
learners for university life
With a smart new mobile app, two
young entrepreneurs hope to
offer school learners and
university students the
mentorship they never had. To
get their venture off the ground,
the entrepreneurs have, in turn,
been receiving support from the
Telkom FutureMakers programme
and the Cape Innovation and
Technology Initiative (CiTi).
Both grew up in Butterworth in the Eastern Cape.
It’s a town with a rich history, but it also falls within a school
district where matric results have – for all the well-
documented reasons – consistently fallen among the
province’s poorest. Mpambani went to Butterworth High,
one of the better- performing schools in the district.
Vuli-Valley, where Qhusheka attended school, does less well.
The schools shaped the pair’s experiences when they started
planning for university studies. Butterworth High had plenty of
resources and support Mpambani could draw on when
looking into his options.
He applied on time, had a good idea of what he wanted to
study, and started his BCom studies at Nelson Mandela
Metropolitan University in 2007 pretty much according to
plan.

2. But even then he wasn’t as prepared as he
thought he’d be – he soon discovered that he
didn’t care for accounting, dropped out, and
eventually had to find his own way onto an
investment planning degree more to his liking.
Qhusheka was left to even more of his own
devices.
Unfamiliar with application processes
and deadlines, he barely got into Stanford
Business College, wasn’t happy with the course
he had rushed into, and by 2008 he had
relocated to the Western Cape and enrolled for
a national diploma in information technology at
the Cape Peninsula University of Technology
(CPUT).These scenarios are played out daily in
South Africa, the pair later realised. A little
guidance and mentorship could have saved
them a lot of time and anguish. So together
again after their studies, they in 2012 started
Connecting Schools, a programme that
connected learners in Butterworth with university
students who could act as mentors. The two
launched the project at WSU, but are now also
expanding it to CPUT.
“We wanted to build a platform through which a
learner, while still at high school, could speak to a
student at a university they want to go to and
doing a programme that they’re interested in,
who could advise them on what it would take to
get into that institution or into that specific
programme,” explains Mpambani.
Connecting Schools is low-tech. The business
partners physically visited schools and WSU to
sign up learners and recruit willing university
students. To usher the project into the 21st
century, Mpambani and Qhusheka have now
developed an app, which they have christened
CareRott.
CareRott – pronounced ‘carrot’ – is an online
community that connects high-school scholars,
primarily from disadvantaged areas, with student
mentors at universities.
Both mentors and mentees sign up on the app,
which can be viewed in a browser or
downloaded onto a basic smart phone. They
correspond exclusively via CareRott, which
operates similarly to the WhatsApp mobile
messaging app, with a few refinements. To allay
parents’ fears around safety, for instance,
correspondence is carefully shepherded
(through specific categories and topics) and
logged.
The app’s name takes getting used to, but
reflects the business’ mission statement, explains
Mpambani. It’s a portmanteau of ‘care’
(“Mentorship is all about caring”) and ‘carrot’.
The vegetable, which appears in the company
logo, is associated with improved vision, a quality
highlighted in CareRott’s slogan: Connecting
Visionaries. With CareRott, the partners hope to
give other learners what they didn’t have.
“I believe there is no lack of knowledge out
there,” says Qhusheka. “It’s just a matter of asking
for help from the right people, people who are
willing to share what they know in terms of career
advancements and life in general. If I had access
to mentorship at a younger age, that would have
greatly benefited me, made me more proactive
and more assertive around my career aspirations.”
But if CareRott’s heart is in the right place, it hardly
screams money-spinner.
This is why Mpambani and Qhusheka last year
applied to and won a place on InnoTech, a
Telkom-funded initiative designed to drive
innovation in South Africa’s ICT sector. InnoTech, a
bespoke programme that aims to take black-
owned start-ups from concept to market, is run on
behalf of Telkom FutureMakers by the Bandwidth
Barn in Woodstock, which forms part of the Cape
Innovation and Technology Initiative (CiTi).
Over the past five months, Mpambani and
Qhusheka have benefited from a suite of support
services at The Barn. They received R20 000 in
‘angel funding’ to cover some of their initial costs
of designing and developing the app, and to get
their venture off the ground. They were provided
with office space, as well as internet and
telephone access. They were guided as they drew
up a business plan. For an initial eight weeks they
explored and were grilled on every nook and
cranny of CareRott. They then graduated to a
three-month programme for further business
coaching.
It’s here where the partners developed and
refined the business model for CareRott. Rather
than sell the app to learners and their parents, as
they’d initially planned, it was decided that
income will be generated through paid ads and
notices for universities, national institutions, funding
programmes, and even corporates (many run
education initiatives) keen to reach learners and
students. And the app can easily be scaled up
beyond national borders. (A UK university has
already shown interest.)
CareRott will soon be piloted and advertised, and
at the same time the business partners approach
sponsors and investors. They expect the app to
“boom” very quickly – they want to sign up
100,000 users within the first few months.
After months of preparation, crunch time is coming
for CareRott.