Marlon Parker

Founder, Reconstructed Living Lab

His Story
Marlon Parker is a Social Entrepreneur and an Information Technology Lecturer at Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) since October 2000.  His field and expertise is in ICT for Community Empowerment. Marlon is co-author of the published book, “The social and economical impacts of e-commerce“.  He served as one of the judges for the 2008 E-commerce Awards and was nominated in 2009 as one of the Top Young South Africans by the Mail and Guardian. His current project entails the usage of ICT as a change agent to empower citizens in communities in tension, of which the Advice Support Network came about, serving more than 40,000 people across South Africa with social related issues using mobile phones.

Description of Organization
RLabs is a non-profit, passionate about reconstructing communities through innovation. It empowers local communities in disadvantaged contexts that are developing new innovations to meet local and international needs. All the projects are by the people, for the people. Such initiatives have created the world’s first Mobile Counseling/Support Platform (JamiiX.com) where counseling and support is provided to over 100,000 people across Southern Africa in the areas of HIV/AIDS, depression, substance abuse, child abuse and other social issues causing tension in communities. This technology innovation has been developed by locals on the Cape Flats (a community impacted by a number of social ills) and has been launched in Northern Europe (2 August, Helsinki Finland) with expansions aimed to the rest of Europe, United Kingdom and South East Asia by end of 2010.

Goal
The goal is to commercialize JamiiX so as to achieve sustainability in the social impact activities by RLabs in communities and to ensure people have access to FREE social services to improve their standard of living in disadvantaged and rural areas. Also, the organization aims to build an international network of possible collaboration partners to scale such an initiative.

Help Needed

• Find a partner to help scale JamiiX to other parts of the world
• Setup an international network with local champions
• Assistance with a communications and marketing plan
• Support on how to pitch the innovation and social initiative to commercial industries
• Assistance with social franchising the RLabs non-profit activities to other countries and regions

His TEDx-Talk

Progress

During TEDxChange in Amsterdam Marlon Parker had the assistance of Anna Chojnacka. Together they elaborated on Marlons project and discussed how his dinner table guest could help spread this idea.

Here’s a quote from Marlon about what has happened after his pitch in Amsterdam:

Being part of TEDxAmsterdam was not just about the expertise around the table but for me it was more about the building of partnerships that could strengthen the JamiiX network. In all aspects the JamiiX network is now richer for the opportunity to be part of the TEDxAmsterdam experience.

Two things that I’ve taken away from the event:
1) My transition from non-profit work to business needs guidance and for that I am in the process of finding me a business mentor. I also realised that I need to get a strong business partner who could drive that aspect of the business more.
2) Everyone we shared JamiiX with saw the potential in the product and it was very encouraging. This gave us the passion to further drive our product innovation.

Follow Marlon on his Twitter page.