Northern Cape, South Africa – As the social development sector confronts rising gender-based violence (GBV), fractured service delivery, and a lack of community trust, Khulisa Social Solutions is redefining how NGOs can respond through innovation that is human-centred, data-powered, and
deeply local.

From Monday, 26 to Wednesday, 28 May 2025, Khulisa will host a series of groundbreaking
workshops in Postmasburg and Danielskuil, aimed at unlocking community-driven responses to GBV. The sessions will be run in collaboration with four partner NGOs—Blessed is the Hand that Gives, Tsantsabane Skills Development Centre, Kgatelopele Youth Development Forum, and Saving Lives Danielskuil—and will introduce a nationally unprecedented integration of Narrative Therapy, Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT), and artificial intelligence to enable local NGOs to co-design interventions that are emotionally resonant, systemically relevant, and ready to scale.

“Too often, development initiatives are top-down, fragmented, and reactive,” says Lesley Ann van Selm, Managing Director of Khulisa. “We are building an ecosystem that listens, responds, and evolves with the people it serves—using insight, not assumption.”
These workshops follow a recent internal training led by global innovation and systems thinking specialist Indra Wussow, who introduced Khulisa’s national team to powerful participatory tools for community mapping, systems design, and stakeholder alignment. These tools now form the foundation of a larger social compacting process, where NGOs, municipalities, and community leaders co-develop shared agreements on roles, responsibilities, and joint solutions.

One of the most transformative models Khulisa has introduced is a next-generation workshop format that merges Narrative Therapy with SIT to challenge conventional approaches to GBV prevention. Participants don’t simply reflect on trauma—they re-author it. Stories of pain and resilience are transformed into blueprints for collective innovation. These are then developed into grassroots prevention models such as:

• Redefining GBV responders as local figures like taxi drivers and shopkeepers.
• Reprogramming awareness campaigns for churches, clinics, and mobile platforms.
• Designing seasonal interventions aligned with patterns like school holidays or month-end stressors.

But the innovation doesn’t end there. Each story, insight, and prototype developed in the workshops is captured and analyzed through a custom AI engine designed to detect emerging trends, identify system failures, and highlight community assets. This real-time data creates a dynamic feedback loop between community voice and strategic decision-making, empowering NGOs, informing funders, and enabling targeted, evidence-based interventions.

Khulisa’s broader intervention in the Northern Cape, active since October 2023, has seen the four grassroots NGOs transformed from small, under-resourced entities into high-performing, self- sustaining changemakers. These organisations have been trained in financial governance, safeguarding, restorative justice, proposal writing, and AI integration.

As of April 2025, they have collectively secured over R3.5 million in funding and are now mentoring other NGOs in their regions.

“This isn’t a one-off project—it’s a replicable model for how we reimagine civil society from the ground up,” adds van Selm. “By fusing storytelling with technology, and innovation with empathy, we’re not just solving problems—we’re redesigning the systems that create them.”

As South Africa grapples with persistent GBV, poverty, and community fragmentation, Khulisa’s hybrid approach