Being a parent is a very difficult thing because when you don't have anything to put on the table, the kids don't know any better. In 2014, I found myself in that situation. I was diagnosed with cancer and I didn't have a job. Because I was too sick, I couldn't work and I ended up with no food, not knowing where my next plate was going to come from. 

Umgibe is our traditional wardrobe. See, when I was growing up, we grew up in a round hut and there was this rope that was always on the wall. Because they were grass huts, the termites would be on the ground and if you left your clothes or your sleeping mats on the ground, the termites would eat them. So we had Umgibe, where we hung our clothes, the blankets and everything.

Innovation to me means breaking the boundaries, disrupting the system. It's a change of mindset, of not saying I can't do it but saying, "How can I actually change this so that it works for me?"

One of the most difficult things for small-scale farmers is that they grow beautiful vegetables and then people come but they don't want to take them on offtake agreements because the fear is that they are not consistent.

Umgibe is an incubator for small-scale farmers who want to do agribusiness. We go further than just planting the seed on the ground. We start from seedlings - we've got a seedling nursery that has a capacity for 200,000 seedlings. We contract to grow and we also take all these other vegetables - the ugly vegetables - and we process them. We do chips, blanched chips, we do wine, beetroot wine, beetroot juice, butternut wine, sauces and everything. Nothing gets thrown away because we even take the peels. We take them, we do vermiculture and we feed them to our worms. They give us tea - we make what we call worm tea and we sell. So everything is like a circular economy.

When you patent, you patent your design on how the system has been made. So, the components of what is being used and everything. Then it's your system - if somebody else wants to use it, they need it to come through you.

I don't train, I facilitate. When you facilitate, it's like you're letting it be. You found this entrepreneur with these thoughts, you just help them to navigate so that they reach their vision. I always say that entrepreneurship is like a person that wants to take a vacation. The first thing they need to know is the destination. But it also takes more than just knowing what you want to do.

I was invited by Grace Church some time ago to do training on organic farming, and that day I told my story on how I started this journey. About six months ago, I saw a message on social media about somebody who was selling seedlings. They said the seedlings were organic and that piqued my interest so I went there. When I got there, I didn't know the person but the person was so happy to see me and I asked, "What's going on?" He replied, "You restored my life." I asked how and he said, "I went and started a seedlings nursery to feed myself just like you did. But it turned out that people started asking me to sell them seedlings".

Today, he supplies more than 60,000 seedlings a month. For me, that is the highlight because here is a guy that I trained, there was the seed that I had planted and it was shining and it was bright.

It's been very humbling but for me, it's not about the awards, it's about how many lives one can touch in their lifetime. Little acts of empowerment. For me, the awards are like a degree that you have in your box somewhere but if it doesn't get used for the good of humankind, it's useless.

I'm going to Egypt to represent South Africa on food security as a speaker on food security systems. On how to build resilient food systems that are going to go through even when there is climate change.