The Cape IT Initiative (CITi) is a non-profit organization established in 1998 to address systemic challenges undermining the growth and sustainability of the technology sector (ie IT, ICT, ICTe, Tech&Design and software) in the Western Cape, South Africa. In 2010 we expanded our focus to also include our major regional technology-enabled sectors, including financial services, retail and government as the systemic impact of offshoring of skills by these sectors was undermining the growth of our local software and IT sector.

CITi is the “mothership” of a number of initiatives in startup support (aka enterprise development), skills capacity building (aka Skills & Human Resource Development), cluster development, research and market growth programmes, as well as a host of smaller initiatives like codersRcreative, the Software CEOs Forum, the Academic HODs Forum, IT Heroes, CITi Café Conversations, and much more. We keep our stakeholders updated via Twitter and Facebook because we believe pictures tell the story best (and because that’s the best way to show how passionate we are about what we do). Follow us on:

We have created two spinoff initiatives – The Bandwidth Barn (a subsidiary company) and CapaCITi1000.

The Bandwidth Barn (now called TheBarn) was established in 2000 to provide space, community and enterprise development training programmes to the Tech & Design sectors. CITi operates from the 6th Bandwidth Barn, based in the rapidly emerging tech and design hub of Woodstock, Cape Town.

CapaCITi 1000

CapaCITi 1000 is a set of unique industry-demand driven, multi-stakeholder programmes with UCT, CPUT and UWC to fast-track and up-skill unemployed graduates (both IT and non-IT graduates) in IT skills in critical short supply – particularly Business Analysis & Systems Analysis, software development (mobile, java, php, IBM RPG, SAP etc) and IT Infrastructure and Application Management. We attract graduates from around South Africa and have an over 90% placement rate of our programme beneficiaries. Companies that have benefited from our programmes include Old Mutual, Sanlam, Santam, Pick ‘n Pay, The Foschini Group (TFG), Shoprite, JD Group, Metropolitan Health Group, MIH, Greatsoft, Clickatell, Edgetec, Elemental Web Solutions, BT Cape, Centre for e-Innovation (WCG), State IT Agency, GoogleLab, SMC Enterprise, RSAWeb, IMQS, Fundamo, Grapevine, U-Turn, 4iMobile, Evly, Skyrove, T-Systems, Airborne Consulting, Optisolutions, Saratoga, Clicks2Customers, BreadbinInteractive, EOH, R-Data, Med-E-Mass and many others.

IT Heroes and Future IT Heroes (a project to showcase IT success stories) (www.itheroes.org.za)

codersRcreative (a fun project to highlight the creativity of software developers, also available as a team building event) (https://twitter.com/CodersRCreative)

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