Barloworld’s flagship programme Barloworld Mbewu provides tailored support to social enterprise start-ups, established social businesses, organisations and institutions, using good business practices to solve social challenges. We spoke to programme recipient and social enterprise maverick Ncedo Ludada, whose story reveals how supporting a cause-driven business can restore individual dignity and drive industry innovation.
Prosthetist and Orthotist Ncedo Ludada has owned and operated Ludada and Associates Orthopedic Services (LAOS) for close to seven years, restoring independence to people living with physical impairments. Thanks to the Barloworld Mbewu programme, the company, headquartered in Mthatha in the Eastern Cape with a new branch in Gqeberha, has been set up to manufacture assistive devices such as prosthetic limbs, wheelchairs and other supporting aids.
The enterprise is also exploring the provision of affordable orthotic and prosthetic rehabilitation for the physically impaired and helps patients to secure quality rehabilitative devices through a device rental programme.
Ludada, who is currently completing his MBA at the Regenesys Business School and working towards a PhD in business management, took a circuitous but determined path to reach his vocation. He had been training and working in the profession for several years when an encounter with a disappointed patient inspired him to look for ways to provide amputees with more affordable access to rehabilitative medical services.
The patient – a teacher who had lost a leg to diabetes and required a prosthesis to return to work – rejected the leg that Ludada had spent a week making for him.
“He actually left with the crutches that he came with. He told me that the leg was crippling him more than enabling him.”
Ludada knew that the technology available in the public sector was insufficient for more active people, limiting their individual capacity and mobility as well as their ability to earn a living. Believing that if something bothers you, it is your problem to solve, he felt driven to improve the situation. Education had taught him what he wanted to know previously, so it was to education that he returned. He received a scholarship to study in Australia, studying for 18 months and returning to South Africa to take up a lecturing post.
Ludada was not yet ready to establish the business he envisaged, but started small, building a private practice that he leveraged to give his students much-needed experience in exchange for the use of the university’s manufacturing laboratories.
“This is when I started enjoying the practical work. I was using technology that change lives. Someone comes in with a wheelchair, but they leave with their legs,”
he enthuses.
Discovering the social enterprise model
Ludada’s practice quickly outstripped his capacity. Within a year he knew it was time to set out on his own. However, while he had the qualifications and the skills, he had no knowledge of business. He knew he wanted to grow and develop his company, but struggled to reconcile running a sustainable, for-profit business with his social desire to provide a service to the patients who needed his talents.
He stumbled across the social enterprise concept while researching Barloworld Mbewu’s funding programme. The combination of a for-profit business that creates change in society was the perfect fit. Ludada joined the programme’s first cohort.
Barloworld Mbewu funded LAOS’s laboratory and machinery to the value of R1.2 million while providing the company with a slew of other non-financial resources, such as leadership and business mentoring and access to study material.
“It was really helpful for us. With no business knowledge, you need people who have done it before. Meeting like-minded people who are doing social things while making money became the business model that hit home. At the end of the day, it’s a double payment when you’re making money and you’re making change.”
Demonstrating social return on investment
Funding and mentorship gave Ludada the chance to realise his vision of bringing more equity to the problem. He could begin to challenge the cycle of poverty and disability that the substandard materials and technology available in the public sector perpetuated. Matching appropriate materials and technologies to individual patient needs delivers more reliable and sustainable prostheses.
His company could offer better rehabilitation, a necessary process to prepare patients to receive and use prostheses. According to the World Health Organization, the demand for rehabilitation and prostheses outstrips supply, with only one in ten people who need it having access to the necessary services. Ludada explains that extended waiting periods can reduce the likelihood of prosthetic success.
“The outcome of this limited supply is that people can wait three to five years to receive a prosthetic leg. While working with my students, we met someone who had been waiting for 40 years for a device.”
One of the inventive ways the company aims to bring equity to the prosthetics space, is by challenging the single-use regulation of devices in the interests of broader sustainability. The process of fitting a final prosthetic can involve several quality, interim devices, which could, where appropriate, be circulated among patients, increasing the lifespan of prostheses, reducing waste and benefiting individual patients. “I think a good-quality second-hand device is better than brand-new poor technology that doesn’t enable the patient functionally.”
An inventory of second-hand devices would also benefit institutions that are training the next generation of prosthetists. Aware as he is of budget restraints at universities, Ludada says used devices would give the students the opportunity to adapt prostheses that patients would otherwise not be able to afford. It would also be an invaluable learning experience for students.
Ludada’s MBA research into circular economy business models is informing his company’s approach. It builds on the Australian ‘outcomes-based treatment’, which slowly builds patients to their maximum capacity and ultimate prosthetic. LAOS views prostheses as too expensive to be regarded as waste and aims for zero waste by 2035.
Learning from the process
Ludada advocates strongly for replicating social enterprises like his as well as the sort of support he received from Barloworld Mbewu. He says funders are essential in helping social entrepreneurs to realise their ideas.
He encourages funding programmes to increase efficiencies by aligning themselves with social enterprises in the same or similar sectors. Integrating suppliers like LAOS into company supply chains could enhance social and environmental sustainability while delivering economic benefits for the parties involved.
To social enterprises navigating the challenges of establishing themselves, he recommends holding true to their original social purpose. He advises treating money as a by-product of an enterprise’s activities rather than the focus.
He also suggests looking at how our country’s weaknesses can be turned to strengths. In his own sector for example, a mere 16% of people benefit from private healthcare because of inequality. This inequality might be leveraged to benefit those in need by tapping into this resource (private healthcare) to source devices that could be used by those in need.
Ludada urges the constant testing of new ideas and innovations to solve social problems.
“I am here to create havoc in my own space. It’s in my nature that I won’t take anything lying down, especially when I see there’s something I can do about it. What we need at this point in time is more challengers than takers.”
Ludada says the Barloworld Mbewu programme gave him the sense of purpose he needed to realise his vision. It helped him clarify who he was, what he wanted and how to set about achieving it.
Barloworld Mbewu
Barloworld Mbewu is motivated by Barloworld’s drive to inspire a world of difference, enabling growth and progress in society by providing seed funding, access to finance and incubation to social enterprises. The programme’s training and mentorship enable social entrepreneurs to grow and scale their businesses to make a significant and lasting impact on social enterprises doing excellent work in South African communities.
Barloworld Mbewu funds South African-run organisations that have been operational for more than a year and are preferably active in marginalised, previously disadvantaged communities. The programme supports organisations active in education, industrial technology, agro-processing, agriculture, the green economy or groundbreaking social innovation/technology that addresses local challenges.
Noluvo Vovo Ngcwabe
Consultant: Barloworld Empowerment Foundation
NoluvoN@BWEF-Mbewu.co.z
Source: The original version of this article was published in the Trialogue Business in Society Handbook 2023 (26th edition).
