Journey to Jazz has employed more than 500 youths in Prince Albert, where more than half the residents live below the poverty line.
Prince Albert, South Africa (03 November 2026) – Young people in Prince Albert, a small Karoo town in one of the poorest districts in the Western Cape, are finding jobs, skills and hope through a community-run jazz festival.
“My CV now looks so much better,” said 33-year-old Shamonay Daniels, one of the attendants for the annual Journey to Jazz festival in Prince Albert.
During the festival, young people can be seen donning their pink festival T-shirts with the festival motto “Groet is ‘n moet” (greeting is a must).
The Central Karoo District, which comprises Beaufort West, Prince Albert, and Laingsburg local municipalities, is the poorest district in the Western Cape. But a community-led non-profit, Prince Albert Community Trust (PACT), is working to change this with a youth-led jazz festival, a restaurant, a theatre, a garden project, a chess club, an early childhood development centre and many other initiatives.
After PACT founder Ingrid Wolfaardt saw children aimlessly wandering the streets of Prince Albert, she started the initiative in 2013 to “empower” young people with work experience and provide economic opportunities.
Prince Albert municipality, an arid semi-desert region, has about 18,000 residents, about half of whom live in the town of Prince Albert. It also includes Leeu-Gamka, Bitterwater and Klaarstroom.
According to the Western Cape’s Municipal Economic Review and Outlook 2025/26, in 2024, over half of the Central Karoo district residents lived below the lower-bound poverty line of R1,109 per person per month
The municipality has described the region as a “poverty pocket” within the Central Karoo and the province, according to its integrated development plan for 2022 to 2027.
PACT’s annual Journey to Jazz festival has provided direct employment to over 500 young people since it started in 2023. The four-day festival will be hosted for a fifth time in early May next year. Young people help curate the programme, assist with marketing, and learn to budget, said Wolfaardt.
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In 2026, 4,540 festival tickets were sold and accommodation in Prince Albert was sold out, giving a major boost to the local economy.
Brenda Sisane, SA jazz radio host, is co-founder and creative director of the festival and Kyle Shepherd, music composer, is the artistic director.
Daniels is from Leeu-Gamka, about 50km from Prince Albert. The town has high youth unemployment.
“We had children who got into drugs or alcohol and smoked hookah pipes the whole day because there was nothing else to do here. Young people, many with matric, have had to move to farms or Cape Town to find work,” said Daniels.
Journey to Jazz is an economic lifeline.
“We engaged with so many new people across culture and language and we saw how other nationalities interacted with us and each other,” said Daniels.
Youth participants were proud that they had researched and knew everything about the artists performing at their venues and could confidently field any questions, she said.
Melony Moos is manager at PACT’s social enterprise ONS Botanicals, which grew out of a need to fund the trust’s Ek is Oulik care project.
ONS offers cooking courses and consists of a garden, an eatery and a retail space selling soaps, lotions, teas and other products.
Moos said the jazz festival has made a huge difference in the North End community, which is a historically disadvantaged predominantly coloured township in the town. She said the desire to do “something good” is contagious in the community. “They want to be a part of it,” she said.
“People underestimate what small towns can do and what they can accomplish. If people take hands, and they are serious … collaborating, teaching, giving skills to our youth. This is all made possible because we want to strive to be better for our community,” said Moos.
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