GTP Northern Collective Video Podcast - presented by the Greater Tygerberg Partnership

Women in Corporate: From Influence to Impact

Guests: Nasmera Buckus, Chief Operating Officer, Greater Tygerberg Partnership; Dr Shirley Zinn, Chair of the V&A Waterfront and Wesgro; Petro Myburgh, Senior Manager of Sustainability, V&A Waterfront; Carin Fouché, Innovation Lead: Future Fit Value Chains, Heineken Beverages

Topics: Corporate Impact and Community Engagement - Informal Economy - Sustainable Placemaking - Women in Leadership - Bellville and the Greater Tygerberg Precinct

Four women, one shared conviction: real change happens when corporate influence meets a real place with real people in it. This conversation brings together the GTP's Nasmera Buckus - who anchors the discussion in the lived reality of Bellville - alongside three corporate leaders from governance, precinct management and global innovation. The question they explore together: how does boardroom intent actually reach the street?

Key takeaways by theme

From job title to real impact: the gap between boardroom and street

The opening question set the tone for everything that followed: how often does the conversation in the boardroom actually reach the street?

• Nasmera Buckus was direct: not enough. The challenge is not intention - organisations invest millions in sustainability and social impact - but proximity. The closer decision-makers get to communities, the better the outcome. Impact becomes real when it changes someone's daily life: a trader with access to infrastructure, a young person with a job, a public space safe enough for a mother to walk through.
• Dr Shirley Zinn brought the governance lens: boards often tick boxes rather than authentically understanding the lived impact on the people they intend to reach. Bridging the gap requires leaders to move beyond a profit mindset and genuinely embed transformation, equity and care into daily practice - treating community impact as integral to shareholder return, not separate from it.
• Petro Myburgh agreed the challenge is rarely willingness in the boardroom - it is what happens after the decision. Strategy must be embedded, budgets aligned, and all stakeholders brought along on the journey. Trade-offs must be discussed honestly. Her example: Makers' Landing, V&A Waterfront's kitchen incubator, will not show returns in its early years - but the long-term goal of enterprise development justifies the trade-off, and that conversation must happen upfront.
• Carin Fouché introduced an innovation tool: define the problem through the right lens from multiple perspectives, build a working hypothesis for how a solution will create impact, and then test that hypothesis early through pilots and community feedback. This creates a learning loop that allows organisations to adapt quickly, rather than locking into a solution designed far from the problem.

Reimagining the informal economy as a value chain partner

South Africa has one of the most dynamic informal economies in the world - and one of the most overlooked. The panel explored what changes when big corporates stop seeing it as a risk and start seeing it as a partner.

• Nasmera described Bellville's informal traders - some trading for 10 to 20 years - as resilient entrepreneurs who understand their customers, supply chains and local markets better than most formal systems recognise. GTP's Level Up Programme has shown that people do not need handouts - they need pathways: skills, networks and opportunities to participate in the formal economy.
• Carin shared Heineken's tavern transformation initiatives - providing infrastructure upgrades, training and licensing support to informal taverns, which represent a significant share of the company's customer base. The work requires genuinely understanding the daily realities of a tavern owner's business, which differ fundamentally from corporate operating assumptions.
• Petro noted that over 430 small businesses operate within the V&A Waterfront precinct, many with roots in informal trade - from the Buskers programme and Watershed market to the Joy from Africa campaign supporting beadwork and wire artists. She also highlighted the value of indirect impact: partnering with intermediary organisations like the CRDC and Resonate on projects such as Bag That Builds translates waste collection into economic value without requiring a direct commercial relationship between a large corporate and an informal trader.
• Shirley closed the theme with a mindset shift: move from charity to dignity. The informal economy is a powerhouse of skills and on-the-job apprenticeship. Treating informal entrepreneurs as genuine partners - built on trust, respect and co-creation - is what creates shared value and unlocks human potential that the formal economy alone cannot reach.

What a sustainable precinct actually looks like

Moving sustainability from policy to something people live and work in every day.

• Nasmera framed sustainability as a system, not a destination - environmental, social and economic dimensions working together. In Bellville, GTP has diverted tons of waste from landfill, supported school recycling programmes, created circular economy jobs and invested in public space. The real test: are communities more resilient today than they were yesterday?
• Petro made it tangible through the VandA model: efficient resource management (water recycling, on-site waste recovery, energy conservation) paired with placemaking, enterprise incubation and business resilience. A sustainable precinct means generators that keep businesses trading during load shedding, financial safety nets for small tenants during a pandemic, and clean water access during drought. Sustainability requires honest acknowledgement of trade-offs and a commitment to looking after the entire ecosystem through them.
• Carin challenged businesses to move beyond a narrow focus on their own waste stream and think in terms of circular ecosystems - where one industry's waste becomes another's input. Glass and can recycling in South Africa offer an example of where cross-industry collaboration, rather than isolated mono-value-chain thinking, unlocks the most meaningful and scalable innovation.
• Shirley connected sustainability to culture and long-term commitment. Drawing on Richard Barrett's concept of liberating the corporate soul, she argued that sustainability must be a lived daily experience for staff, customers and communities - treated as a strategic investment rather than a cost. True commitment shows in upskilling, genuine care and prioritising purpose over profit, especially when times are difficult.

Women, influence and the courage to act

The most personal theme of the conversation - and the most candid. What genuinely gets in the way of turning influence into lasting, visible change?

• Nasmera spoke to the gap between the urgency communities feel and the pace at which partner organisations move through funding cycles, governance and competing priorities. Her conclusion: influence is not about authority, it is about trust. The most impactful people she has worked with do not have the biggest titles - they have the strongest relationships. Real change happens when influence is used in service of something bigger than yourself.
• Shirley, drawing on her book Swimming Upstream, spoke to the courage required to claim space - and to build your own table when no seat is offered. Courage is not about being loud; it is about showing up intentionally and consistently. Impact does not require changing everything at once - it requires creating ripples and drawing on the collective energy of those around you.
• Petro noted that resource-efficiency arguments are relatively easy to make internally because they align with cost savings. The harder, more courageous conversations are about people over profit - skills development, job creation and enterprise development - which are harder to quantify but where the most meaningful impact happens. She named a real risk for women in leadership: bringing emotion into the room can be dismissed as less credible, when in fact it is often where the deepest insight lives.
• Carin spoke to sustaining herself through repeated rejection on innovation journeys - multiple "no's" before an idea gains traction - and the importance of remaining anchored to a clear vision and purpose that attracts others over time. On global transformation: businesses are quick to celebrate award-winning successes, but the real insight comes from deliberately seeking out and learning from the initiatives that failed or were never scaled.

Closing: one thing to do differently

Each guest was asked for one specific shift organisations could make in how they engage the communities around them.

• Carin: listen better - pay close attention to the practical, daily realities communities describe, not just the problems organisations assume they have.
• Petro: stop seeing communities as beneficiaries and start seeing them as participants in your ecosystem. That single mindset shift changes everything that follows.
• Shirley: stop designing solutions from the office. Go and sit in community spaces, hear what people are actually saying, and then co-design responses with them - not for them.
• Nasmera: design with communities, not for them. And shift the internal question from "how much does impact cost?" to "what is the cost of inaction?" Every unsafe space, every unemployed person, every struggling entrepreneur carries a cost. Partnerships are how that changes.

Series: GTP Northern Collective Video Podcast

Produced by: Future Cities Africa, for the Greater Tygerberg Partnership