Buskaid: A String Orchestra Rising From Soweto

British violist Rosemary Nalden founded Buskaid in 1992 after a BBC documentary revealed the plight of a struggling Soweto string project; she raised the seed funding through a mass 'busk' by professional musicians at British train stations. In 1997 she relaunched the effort as the Buskaid Soweto String Project with fifteen students, and by 1999 the group had South Africa's first purpose-built music school, complete with practice studios and an instrument-repair workshop. The Buskaid Ensemble has since toured internationally more than two dozen times, performing in countries from the UK and USA to Botswana and Colombia, and as of 2022 the school was teaching around 125 students aged four to thirty, all drawn from the surrounding township community.