The Genesis Project, which forms a key part of the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Faculty of Commerce’s postgraduate diploma in management and entrepreneurship, is celebrating its 30th year in 2026. The programme’s unique structure and keen focus on building business acumen has seen it become one of the most highly acclaimed entrepreneurship courses on offer.
Throughout its three-decade existence, the Genesis Project has been equipping young people with the tools to develop outstanding business leadership and management skills in a highly entrepreneurial context.
Over the course of an academic year, students are immersed in an intensive action-learning environment, where they set up and run their own businesses – doing everything from fundraising startup capital for their ventures to developing products and reporting to a board of directors chosen from industry.
“It’s an honours-level one-year postgraduate diploma in management and entrepreneurship that’s essentially three academic years squeezed into one. On top of the heavy academic load, students have to set up and run their own businesses,” explained project convenor, Stuart Hendry, who has been at the helm of the Genesis Project for nearly 27 years.
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“They have to come up with a product, develop it, build a brand, manage the books and report to their board of directors every month.”
“They have to start a real business – not create a pitch or a business plan or draw up a case study. They have to come up with a product, develop it, build a brand, manage the books and report to their board of directors every month.”
This action-learning model, where budding entrepreneurs are given the space to start their own ventures while receiving mentorship and coaching from industry experts, has seen the programme produce reams of successful enterprises.
“Our students aren’t just reading about how to set up a business in a textbook; they’re learning about entrepreneurship by doing. That grounding gives them the tools they need to either take their ventures further after the Genesis Project.
“We know, from our research, that one in four businesses that are created for the Genesis Project continue post-graduation. On top of that, one in three graduates either sets up their own businesses or joins a startup post-graduation,” Hendry noted.
For Tinaye Mari, whose team developed Buz, a sugar-free, high-electrolyte energy drink, the programme’s intensity was the inflection point for his entrepreneurial journey. “The Genesis Project showed me what building a business is really like. It’s fast-paced, unpredictable and constantly evolving, with priorities changing almost every day,” he said.
“What stood out most was learning to work with people who had different mindsets, perspectives and approaches to solving problems. While that brought its fair share of challenges, it also led to better ideas and stronger decisions.”
Practice makes perfect
While the goals of the Genesis Project are strongly aligned with the fourth pillar of UCT’s Strategy 2030 – which focuses on driving innovation and entrepreneurship to unleash human potential for a fair and just society – the programme’s ventures are not funded by the university.
Instead, students have to raise their own startup capital, much of which comes from two cake sale exercises early in the year. Hendry emphasised that the intensity, ownership and consequent learnings that emerge from these events are invaluable for preparing young entrepreneurs for the realities of the market.
“They raise [the startup funding] themselves in the cake sale exercises, which have served as excellent vehicles for teaching this entrepreneurial mindset. No matter what you’re planning on selling, you have to get the supplies and the machinery, put the effort in to make the products and then sell them at the sale,” Hendry explained.
“There’s this wonderful parallel tracking with Genesis, where students are building a product or a platform and, at the same time, they’re also building a business model, a brand, and a marketing and sales strategy.”
“All of that is preparation for the actual product that they’ll end up making as part of their business. It teaches them how to find the suppliers, produce the goods, price the time, distribute, brand and so on.
“We see that Cake Sale 1 is usually quite chaotic and there are plenty of mistakes made, but by Cake Sale 2, things are more structured and more organised. Then by the time they get to the UCT Genesis Product Launch and Expo – which is essentially the third ‘cake sale’ in August – they’re experts. Not just pricing, branding and selling, but also production.
“So, there’s this wonderful parallel tracking with Genesis, where students are building a product or a platform and, at the same time, they’re also building a business model, a brand, and a marketing and sales strategy.”
For graduates, the lessons from this repeated cycle of making, pricing and selling extend well beyond the programme itself. Charnè Verster, whose team designed and patented Smart School Shoes – the first school shoe that grows with children – said the approach reshaped how she thinks about business entirely.
“The definitive entrepreneurial lesson that has stayed with me is to always fall in love with the problem, not the solution. It is so easy to dream up a cool product first, but Genesis taught me that sustainable business starts with identifying a genuine, deeply felt pain point,” she explained.
“Now, whenever I approach business or problem-solving, I make sure I completely understand the ‘why’ and the market gap before I ever think about the ‘what’.”
Entrepreneurship for impact
One of the reasons for the inception of the Genesis Project back in 1996 was to shift the focus at UCT from building employees to building employers.
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The imperative for this has become unfortunately more clear amid the ongoing youth unemployment crisis in South Africa, where 60.9% of youth aged 15 to 24 and 40.6% of those aged 25 to 34 are currently out of work.
This, Hendry pointed out, is why Genesis is laser focused on combining action learning with innovation. More than building an operational business, students must create a product or platform that is novel in the South African context, and the majority of any components must also be made in the country.
“It’s the startups that are innovating that are creating jobs and addressing the unemployment crisis.”
“We need to be building a new kind of entrepreneur who has a wide view of the problems that we’re facing and can create a business that makes a social impact and that addresses environmental challenges.
“What this is really all about is job creation. Small and medium-sized enterprises are eight times more likely to create jobs than large corporations. It’s the startups that are innovating that are creating jobs and addressing the unemployment crisis,” he added.
Considering this outlook, it should come as no surprise that ventures coming out of the Genesis Project are regularly recognised by the Entrepreneurship Development in Higher Education (EDHE) for their entrepreneurial and innovation impacts, or that the programme itself won the EDHE Award for Entrepreneurship Learning and Teaching Excellence in 2022, and is being replicated at leading institutions around the world.