Neville Govender

My name is Neville Govender, I am employed by the City of Ekurhuleni as a Project Manager in the Economic Development Department. I am responsible for Innovation within the City. I was first introduced to the Fablab concept in 2006 and was really impressed and decided to persude the City, that this was the way to go, inorder to help our communities to get out of poverty and unemployment, by exposing them to technology. It was only in 2011 that I managed to successfully convince the principles and in 2011, we setup up our first Fablab in Thokoza. Since then we have setup an additional four Fablabs, Fablab Tembisa, Fablab Tsakane, Fablab Duduza and Fablab Vosloorus. Since then it has not been a hard task to continue sourcing funding for more Labs. The City is one of the Cities that signed up to becoming a Fab City in 40 years.

All the Fablabs are community Labs and are all owned and managed and funded by the City of Ekurhuleni from its own budgets. The Labs are part of ithe City's service delivery program and thus the facilities are free to the communities. All the materails are also made available to the communities at no cost.

Entering what we call the forth industrial revelution, which looks at innovation, the City has taken its Innovation Programme very seriously. The city will be setting up a Innovation Hub within the next 4 years at a cost of almost R500Mil.

Why FabAcademy for Me?

Since 2011 up and until 2015, I was continuing wiyh my normal functions which was Project Management of the departments capital projects and the Fablabs was a part time programme I managed. After the Mayors commitment in 2015, I was assigned to work fulltime on the Fablab programme.

As the fablab network within Ekurhuleni is growing there is a very keen interests from community to do the FabAcademy , however we are unable to offer it since we do not have a fulltime Guru. The City has made availabe funds for me to complete the FabAcademy and thereafter to be able to offer it to other learners.