IKS, Pharma and Bio-Innovation
Available natural resources
Agro-processing of South African medicinal plants to grow local pharmaceutical manufacturing, rooted in indigenous knowledge systems.
The Catalytic Economic Development and Equity Corporation
Enterprises owned by the people who build them.
CEDEC is a registered South African development company. We build operating enterprises across six pillars, from medicinal plants to secure digital infrastructure, and we write the workers and communities who generate the value into the ownership. A catalyst for economic development in South Africa and across the SADC region.
- Worker and community ownership
- Six pillars, one group
- Proudly South African, built for SADC
Six strategic pillars
Six engines, mutually reinforcing, one group.
Each pillar is an operating business with its own market and its own resources. Together they feed one another: the plants feed the pharma, the waste feeds the fuel, the enterprises feed the young people, and the digital layer runs through all of it.
ICT and Digital Industrialisation
Global demand
Smart manufacturing, AI and IoT platforms, secure communication, enterprise incubation, and track-and-trace systems for compliance and market access.
Energy and Green Economy
Existing offtake market
Local biofuel from agro-processing and industrial waste, renewable generation, and community energy cooperatives.
Automotive and Industrial
National priority
A Soweto automotive supplier park, renewable natural-fibre bio-composites, and black industrialist development.
SME Scaling and Skills
Cross-cutting
SME acceleration, township retail digitalisation, skills development and aggregation so small enterprises reach markets they could not reach alone.
Youth and Higher Education
Youth enabler
A work experience programme, a university-industry nexus, entrepreneurship and venture labs, and a legacy mindset for homegrown heroes.
Pillar 2 in market · Secure communication
Private by design. Built for a region on the rise.
The digital pillar's first products protect the conversations an economy runs on. Every one is encrypted end to end by default, so nobody outside the conversation can read it. Not a platform, not a provider, and not CEDEC.
CEDEC Meet
Meetings and presentations that stay in the room.
Encrypted video conferencing and online presentations for boardrooms, classrooms, clinics and councils. Guests join from a browser or a phone without an account.
CEDEC Workspace
Mail, calendar, drive and docs on your own domain.
Encrypted email and collaboration for a whole organisation, with a password manager and admin controls built in.
Secure Comms as a Service
We run it. You use it.
Rollout, onboarding, training and support for organisations that need secure communication without building a security team first.
Behind the products sits a team with decades inside regulated engineering: enterprise architecture, systems integration, identity and payments in regulated environments, cloud at scale, and offline-capable applications in South African languages.
Ownership and governance
Sawubona. We see you.
Sawubona is the standard CEDEC applies to every ownership arrangement it enters. The test on any clause is simple: does it recognise the person who builds the value, or extract from them?
Every CEDEC operating subsidiary carries the same structure, so the answer does not depend on who negotiated hardest.
Talk to us about a partnership- 01
Employee Ownership Trust
The people who work in an enterprise hold equity in it, through a trust that outlasts any one shareholder.
- 02
Community Trust
The community around an enterprise captures a share of the value it creates, in a structure it controls.
- 03
Social Innovation Fund
A share of profits goes to community-led initiatives, chosen by the communities themselves.
Youth and higher education
Supervised work inside real enterprises, at no cost to the young person.
CEDEC places young people into supervised work inside its own operating enterprises. It serves university students who need work-integrated learning hours, and young people aged 18 to 35 who have finished school or a TVET qualification but have never been employed.
- Placements of three to twelve months, with rotation across pillars where it suits the learning pathway
- A workplace mentor, written learning objectives and a portfolio for every participant
- A work experience certificate with a competency assessment that functions as an employment reference
- Venture Labs on partner campuses, where students build enterprises linked to CEDEC's own value chains
"Enterprise skills belong inside the degree, not in an elective beside it. We work with partner universities to put them there."
The CEDEC university-industry nexus
The region
Built in South Africa. Designed for sixteen nations.
The Southern African Development Community stretches from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. CEDEC's enterprises start at home and are designed to travel: the same ownership standard, the same digital layer and the same youth pathway everywhere they go.
- 16member states
- 345M+people
- $720B+combined GDP
- Angola
- Botswana
- Comoros
- DR Congo
- Eswatini
- Lesotho
- Madagascar
- Malawi
- Mauritius
- Mozambique
- Namibia
- Seychelles
- South Africa
- Tanzania
- Zambia
- Zimbabwe
Population and GDP: SADC Secretariat figures.
Work with us
Partners, institutions, investors and young people: start here.
Tell us who you are and what you want to build. Universities and TVET colleges, government departments, SMEs, offtake partners and secure-communication customers all come through the same door. We reply within one working day.
Prefer email? CEDEC.SA@proton.me