Meet Willemien
Founder of Pabalelo Trust, Willemien has over 30 years of non-profit management experience. An award-winning author and journalist by profession, she enjoys learning more closely the intricacies of subsistence living and the challenge of finding the balance between old and new. She retired from Management in 2023 but as she lives on her small farm in the vicinity of Pabalelo’s Thikaña field, she remains available on call, for practical and leadership assistance.
South-African born Willemien le Roux has lived in Botswana from the age of 14, first at D’Kar in the Ghanzi district and later in the Okavango Sub-district of Ngamiland. She studied Communication Science and Languages at the University of Potchefstroom in South Africa before working as a journalist at a newspaper, production secretary for TV documentaries at SABC in Johannesburg and then Assistant Curator at the Potchefstroom Museum. After twelve year's absence from Botswana her pastor husband’s work took her and their children back to D’Kar in the Ghanzi district, where they established a San-owned development organisation, the Kuru Development Trust, later the Kuru Family of Organisations. They also helped create two San representative organisations, The First People of the Kalahari (FPK), and the regional Working Group of Indigenous Minorities of Southern Africa (WIMSA). Willemien’s most important involvement in the 25 years she worked with Kuru, was around the formation of the Bokamoso Early Childcare Training programme, the establishment of the Kuru Cultural Centre and the well-known Kuru Art Project. In 1998 she published a novel reflecting modern life and complexities of development work with the San, Shadow Bird (Kwela 2000) , and after 1998, when living in Shakawe, she co-ordinated a cross-border community-based oral testimony project, in which San youths from the Ju/’hoan, Khwe, Hai//om and !Xõo peoples documented their own history, which led to the publishing of Voices of the San, (Kwela, 2004), which she co-edited with Alison White, to commemorate the closure of the UN Indigenous Peoples Decade. In Shakawe she worked for TOCaDI and Letloa Trusts (both under the Kuru Family of Organisations) and coordinated the Regional San Education Programme which addressed issues of minority language learning, school drop-out and lack of care in school hostels. She founded the Botshelo Trust for orphans and vulnerable children in Shakawe in 2006, opened two pre-primary playgroups and did several consultancies related to her experience, for e,g. Evaluation for NAMAS of the Nyae Nyae Conservancy Village Schools Project, Namibia, and setting up a San languages Repository for Southern Africa for WIMSA in Windhoek, Namibia.
She did an 8-month long cross-border consultation on the educational status of San children across Southern Africa. This led to the report Torn Apart, on which 4 regional conferences on the need for special attention to minority language groups in Southern African schools was based. As Team facilitator for a year-long cross-border community consultation on traditional San Values-based leadership systems (funded by OSISA), 3 booklets on San Values for different San language groups were produced, but Willemien also helped facilitate and edit around 6 San booklets on folk tales, plant use, place names and oral history. A consultancy for Conservation International in 2009 on the agricultural traditions of the communities along the Kwando river basin in three countries, led to the formation of Pabalelo Trust and the first trials in Conservation Agriculture and Permaculture for food security in the Okavango Panhandle. Since then she has been the Founder Board member and Director of Pabalelo Trust, piloting various programmes for environmentally friendly food security in the Okavango Panhandle, with a team of local community activists from the Samochima village.
