Life changing laptops Campaign

Hi there, my name is Alex and I live in Durbanville in South Africa. After several years of struggling to find employment my husband Danie (age 30) and I (34) recently started a small business: we buy old or broken laptops, fix them and then sell them on to people who can’t afford new laptops.  (South Africa is one of the most unequal societies in the world with a very high percentage of people living well below the breadline.)

To help as many people as possible, we keep the margins low. We love the fact that we’re able to earn a living as entrepreneurs by opening new opportunities for others. Many of our customers are acquiring a laptop for the first time in their lives! 

It’s also great that our little business model helps lengthen the life of individual laptops, thereby reducing ewaste. 

We’ve learnt a lot in a very short time (thank you YouTube!) and now have 

a long waiting list of people begging us to find and fix laptops for them.

We ask people on our neighbourhood social media groups to give or sell their old stuff to us, which they very willingly do. Our challenge at the moment is that the better, newer, more useful laptops are obviously less cheap. Our limited cash flow is unfortunately slowing down our business and the banks are not yet interested in helping us!

We would really appreciate some support in accessing the better laptops. 

For example, we pay on average R500-R1000 for a broken Lenovo,hp and dell laptops , so to speed up the process, we ideally need enough to buy at least 70 laptops over about 5 months: about R25 000.

We hope to find someone who is willing to help us make a success of this business.