Breaking Through

Snegugu Vilakazi wasn’t a born math lover. But like every teen, she craved attention. She tried sports, but she wasn’t really very good at them. Then, in 10th grade, she realized that academics were her ticket: As her grades rose, her parents and peers started taking note of the skills she’d ignored for so long.

Today, as a University of Cape Town student who has moved hundreds of miles from her family, Snegugu loves working with numbers. She plans to get a commerce degree, become a chartered accountant and rise through the corporate ranks to become chief financial officer of a major company. But above all, she plans to carve a new path for black women in South Africa, becoming part of a breakthrough generation that dramatically expands access to higher education and highly skilled careers.

Snegugu’s grit is hereditary. Throughout her childhood in KwaZulu-Natal Province, her parents had little to lean on besides perseverance and hard work. Neither made it past 6th grade. But they built a successful hardware business from the ground up, and raised Snegugu along with four other siblings. Snegugu is every bit as determined as her parents: At 14, she saw a photo of herself at almost 200 pounds and realized that she, like her father and sister, was on the path to diabetes. She shed 45 pounds and kept them off. Once she applied herself to academics, Snegugu quickly became a top student, finishing in third overall among her regions’ 100 schools. In 2010, she gained admittance to the top ranked University of Cape Town (UCT.) The school was 637 miles—12 hours by car—from Snegugu’s family. Her parents came with her to help get her settled in her new home.  

A New World

For any student, arrival on campus can feel almost like waking up in a new country. And in South Africa, the transition can be even more eye-opening. University life offers many students their first-ever opportunities to interact with peers of other races and backgrounds. For Snegugu, as a black woman from the rural KwaZulu-Natal and the first in her family to attend university, the distance between home and campus life is even greater. Her academic prowess has put her on a path that few peers from home will walk anytime soon: In 2008, only 13 percent of black high school students in her home province graduated with the scores required for university entrance. By comparison, some 74 percent of white graduates in the same province attained the required grades. The numbers play out on campus. Inspite of an increasingly mixed-race student body, academic staff at UCT is overwhelmingly white. And Snegugu’s arrival on campus also thrust other, more minor disparities into relief. For instance, once on campus, the young woman realized how small her rural school was. It had no yearbooks, big events, letter jackets or sports teams. It didn’t even have sports equipment.

But for all the disparities, UCT is where Snegugu wants to be. An academic powerhouse, the institution is committed to ensuring that lingering post-apartheid inequalities are rebalanced. One of two South African universities credited with being most influential in the overturn of apartheid, UCT is also one of the few institutions of higher learning that allocates student housing based on financial need and distance from home. Moreover, the school’s Centre for Higher Education is a recognized authority on supporting high potential—and often under-prepared—students from historically disadvantaged groups.

Tools for the Future

Of course, Snegugu’s day-to-day world doesn’t really focus on the tides of history. She attends class and works to acquire the other tools—such as mastery of her profound shyness—she needs to grow into the leader she is determined to be. Terrified of public speaking, Snegugu starts shaking when she faces an audience, even in a classroom setting. But she believes that as with the many goals she has set herself, she can overcome her fear and move on to greater things. The Michael & Susan Dell Foundation believes in Snegugu, too. She is one of 25 scholars who, as the inaugural class of the Dell Young Leaders Program, are attending the University of Cape Town. The five-year Dell Young Leaders Program offers comprehensive support including tuition, technology, psychological and social support, career mentorship, internships and work readiness training to high-potential, historically disadvantaged students like Snegugu.

On one level, the program’s goal is to help these individual students graduate and to get them started on lifelong career paths. On another, the goal is to level the playing field for all black South Africans, who represent 80 percent of the population, but who—almost two decades after the end of apartheid—still make up less than 10 percent of key professional areas. The Dell Young Leaders Program South Africa is expected to grow to 400 scholarships at multiple universities by 2015. The full benefits of the program will be far-reaching, changing the lives of each scholar, and touching their families and the countless people they encounter throughout their lives.

Through the foundation, Snegugu has access to dedicated mentors and counselors. “With the Dell Young Leaders I have found my home,” she says. “I believe in myself and have inner confidence already, but for Dell to accept me as a scholar shows me that they believe in me too. The program is the extra ingredient I needed for success.” She has tackled her shyness head on and manages to focus on her academic work, even in the midst of profound change. 

In the short term, Snegugu will mentor incoming Dell Young Leaders as they transition into university life. Long term, she dreams of building an organization dedicated to providing young women from disadvantaged backgrounds with tuition, career training and more. As she navigates her way toward this goal, Snegugu is building the concrete life skills—including money and time management—that she needs to move forward. She is thrilled to own her own computer (something she never dreamed of back home) and believes that, no matter how far her education takes her, her background imbues her with one irreducible value: Empathy for others who, like Snegugu and her family, are striving for something better.