2 November 2026
The Prince Albert Rieldansers perform at the opening ceremony of the Journey to Jazz Festival held in May this year. The Kritikom Koppie Amphitheatre is a disused quarry on the outskirts of town. Photos: Jeffrey Abrahams
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).
Julian Franse, a PACT ambassador on duty during the festival, tends to plants while his mother washes his pink Journey to Jazz T-shirt so that he can wear it again later that day.
The Showroom Theatre, a 140-seat auditorium is owned and run by PACT and supported by several benefactors. It provides a platform to showcase local talent and to provide training across various employment skills such as management, administration, marketing and technical fields such as sound and lighting. These PACT ambassadors, in their distinctive pink Journey to Jazz T-shirts, were on duty at the theatre during the weekend in May.
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.
This year, for the first time, Journey to Jazz used the spectacular backdrop of the Swartberg Pass where a stage was erected in an area the locals call Die Dansvloer. Zoë Modiga was first up and performed with Zawadi Yamungu.
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.
More than half the residents in the Central Karoo District live below the lower-bound poverty line, which was R1,109 per person per month in 2024.
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.
“It’s been a fantastic way of addressing the unemployment in our town and really empowering young people … You come out just more confident, more competent, understanding what the workplace means,” said Wolfaardt.
Mornings in Prince Albert can be cold but that didn’t deter these youngsters from joining Arno Botha on an early morning bike ride in May. The initiative, called Prince Albert Cycles, was founded over a decade ago by Botha and Charles Ewerts in an attempt to transform the lives of young children in their community through cycling. The children are each given a bike that they need to care for and maintain themselves. In tandem with the cycling, all of the children involved in Prince Albert cycles are part of a learning and literacy programme, Slimlappies, that aims to eliminate illiteracy amongst the children of Prince Albert.
Avilo Hendricks, 25, mentors and tutors learners at the Slimlappies after-school initiative. The programme inspired him to become a teacher. He is currently doing his first year of tertiary studies in education.
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.
During events like Journey to Jazz, accommodation in Prince Albert is usually sold out weeks in advance. Realising the economic potential, paramedics Karin Manuel and her husband, Ernest, have added two rooms to their home in North End, making them the first to offer guest accommodation in their community.
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.
During the Journey to Jazz festival, community kids march past the Prince Albert POP Centre community hub.
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.
One of the main Journey to Jazz venues is the Dutch Reformed Moederkerk. Pictured on the stairs are some of the 100 young people from the district who participated in the event as well as traffic, SAPS and security officers.