Digital creative · Cape Town · Five years in
Sibabalwe
“Siba” Nobandla
I run national campaigns end to end — the strategy, the design, the build, the words and the camera. Five years of work across arts, film and advocacy; three of them leading communications for a national campaign, across a small team and a wide network of partners. Fourteen bodies of work — from a card game you can buy in a shop to a documentary I directed.
2021–2026·14 projects·2,505 posts·76,253 followers gainedOpen to relocation
Sibabalwe “Siba” Nobandla · Cape Town
How I work
Four decisions, four projects
In advocacy, work fails quietly. The research is sound, the submission is filed, the statement goes out — and the young person it was written about never hears any of it. That gap is the job. It is also why I kept adding skills: every time the chain broke, it broke at the last metre.
So I take the argument the whole way — from the room where we decide what to say, to something a nineteen-year-old in Gqeberha can actually pick up. Then I build it so the people I hand it to can keep it running without me.
- Argue for the category, not the line item. The cut was to one programme. I made the case for campaigning on the whole class of programmes, and the team ran with it — which is why it lasted six months and attached to every budget moment on the calendar, rather than one news cycle.PEPs4Youth
- Build the system, not the asset. Twenty member organisations with very little design capacity between them. Rather than produce every campaign set myself, I built a template system their own teams publish from — quicker for them, and it keeps running when I am needed elsewhere.Budget Justice Coalition
- Put it in their hands. Unemployment is the conversation nobody starts. A deck of cards that walks a table from easy to uncomfortable reached rooms our media releases never did — and ended up on a national publisher’s shelf.Thetha Nge Unemployment
- If it does not exist, build it. Budget explainers tend to stop at the infographic, because going further means building something. So I learned enough front end to build it, on the real 2026 figures. A national coalition uses it now.Follow the Money
Who it’s for
Inclusion as production decisions
I am Xhosa, building communications for young South Africans — most of whom are not reached by the way my sector usually talks. What I am trying to make is spaces where everyone feels valued and represented, and in practice that is a production decision long before it is a value. It gets settled in the brief, where it costs something, not in the evaluation, where it costs nothing.
Unemployment here is never only unemployment. It arrives with gender, with race, with language, with where you were born and what it costs to get to an interview. Work that treats those as one problem reaches almost nobody. I plan for the intersections at the start, because retrofitting access is how you end up with a campaign that only speaks to the people who were already listening.
On air
35 named appearances · 14 stations · 2024–2026
The network
Organisations I communicate across, for Youth Capital
Advocacy does not happen inside one organisation. Every campaign here runs through a network of government departments, coalitions, research institutes and delivery partners — each with its own language, its own approvals and its own audience. Making one argument legible across all of them is the job.
Government & national programmes
Coalitions & civil society
Delivery & programme partners
Highlighted: partners I have produced work with or for directly — the Catalyst Now symposium identity and photography, On the Pulse season two.
Written
Published in Daily Maverick
The route here
2021 → now · five years · film, events, advocacy
- Production AssistantLunar Studios — pre- and post-production
- Events Coordinator56 Tambo — youth-led arts & activism space, Bloemfontein
- Social Media ManagerCineBa Film Festival
- Multimedia InternYouth Capital
- Junior Multimedia Content CreatorYouth Capital
- Multimedia StrategistYouth Capital — channel strategy, measurement, and still executing the work
Also
AMC — Amplify, Mobilize, Communicate for Change, DGMT, 2024 cohort. Adobe InDesign, Academy of Digital Arts. Software development, CodeSpace.
Languages
English and isiXhosa fluent · Afrikaans and Sesotho moderate.
What I ran, and what we earned
Jan 2024 – Nov 2026 · Hootsuite & DGMT media monitoring
The channels — mine to run
What the campaigns earned — ours
Earned media is never one person’s. Researchers, writers, spokespeople, community facilitators and partner organisations all move it, and I have worked under comms leads across this period. What is mine in it: I designed the campaigns the coverage came from, ran the channels that carried them, and took a share of the interviews myself.
Design
Figma, Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign — identity systems, campaign sets, publication layout.
Build
React, HTML/CSS, WordPress, Netlify — I ship the thing, not a spec for it.
Film
Premiere, After Effects, DaVinci — concept, shoot, edit, grade.
Strategy
Hootsuite, Meta & Google Ads, GA4, media monitoring — channel mix, testing, reporting.
Worked with
& YearBeyond · Catalyst Now South Africa · Next Step Exchange · Hype Social · Purple Men SA · ad idem