Durban Diamonds

South African Women are not only known for their strength and courage but also for their resourcefulness.

For the majority of African women, poverty is still the order of the day, but Duduzile Luthuli has chosen a very unusual way to earn a living – a way she intend to use to lift other women out of the dark pit of grinding poverty. The world that Dudzile earns a living in, is millions of miles removed from KwaZulu-Natal where it is estimated that almost 40% of the population is still illiterate – Duduzile is in the Diamond Industry.

She started rough and evaluation training in 2005 at the Diamond College in south Africa and in 2006 trained at the university of Belgium at the UAMS (University of Antwerp Management Institute). The training was for the management of the diamond and jewelery business.

In South Africa, poverty and lack of skills and employment are two of the most critical challenges. Together with the husband and wife team, Busisiwe and Douglas Shandu and others, they are forming a consortium and rising to the challenge to establishing a factory and training school for the diamond business in Durban. These fired up entrepreneurs plan to:

Teach the identification and evaluation of rough diamonds
Rough diamond marking
Evaluation of polished diamonds
A cutting and polishing element will be added soon.