Marvel Mthembu is the founder of Crushing The Barriers (CTB) Sports, he started the project in 2015 while in matric and in 2016 he executed the Crushing the Barriers idea.
Today, CTB is running in 25 countries and active in 20 countries. Nineteen of the 25 are African countries. The foundation has seven sub-projects; CTB sports, arts parade, adventures and masterminds, prospect community care building project, operation green world, CTB multi-net media and cuisine experts.
CTB Sports is a sports hosting activities programme for youth across communities and in schools. In the first half of the year they hosted nine sports events.
The Arts Parade segment focuses on discovering and moulding talent in music, visual, arts, poetry, fashion and dance. A first ever online talent show was launched on 1 July. The Adventures and Masterminds segment focuses on education, improving ways of education and contributing to academic excellence.
The Prospect Community Care Building Project charity segment reaches out to the township villages and less privileged families with food items and other essential commodities. They have reached over 18 orphanages globally and impacted over 30 000 old and young people.
Operation Green World focuses on environmentally sustainable solutions through which they do research on the challenges the communities face and how they can be solved.
CTB Multi-Net Media uses their social media platforms to advertise their work. Cuisine Experts focuses on food and cooking shows that are intended for schools and communities, currently operational in Namibia and South Africa.
Marvel’s work has been critical in challenging the status quo around narratives of poverty in Africa, his work is providing practical solutions to reshape parts of the continent by providing practical solutions to addressing day-to-day challenges faced by people across communities in the continent.
His work continues to challenge crime, poverty and the educational crisis and to provide practical solutions to addressing these challenges, including of drug addiction that also usually affects talented sportspeople. His vision is to also be part of a generation that will drive radical change in the education sector of Africa.
His vision is for CTB to reach at least 50 nations and operate predominantly on the African continent. His aim is to improve the foundation’s impact figures at least by 70%, and to begin to raise funds to incentivise his team members as a token of appreciation for the work that they do.
He is of the view that the youth must take the lead in addressing the challenges that the continent continues to face, unemployment, drug abuse, education, poverty etc and says that this generation is technologically blessed, and must use that platform as a way of advancing the continent.
