Sweet Life Diabetes Community

Sweet Life empowers South Africans with diabetes through education and community by giving them the information they need to live healthier lives.

The goal? To reduce the health burden on the South African public health system and the unnecessary mortality rate of diabetes in our country. We are a registered NPO/PBO that believes that lived experience needs to be at the core of diabetes education, so that it’s easy to understand and implement behaviour change. Our mission is to empower people with diabetes on their journey to a healthy, happy life – by providing answers to all their diabetes questions, and a community to support and share their experiences. A South Africa where diabetes is a well-managed condition. Diabetes is currently the number one killer of South Africans, and yet there’s no national diabetes education programme. We believe the answer lies in empowering individuals with diabetes. Our part of the solution is creating education in 5 different languages that is easy to understand, and implement, and rooted in lived experience. Here’s how we’re doing that.

Evidence-based impact

Research shows that diabetes self-management education is an essential part of tackling the diabetes crisis. 49% of costs for Type 2 diabetes are due to complications, which are preventable given the right education and care. The diabetes education currently available depends on where you live: it’s a postcode lottery. That’s where we come in.

• Direct access to over 50,000 South Africans with Diabetes.
• Distributed over 150,000 printed Healthy Food Guides to underserved communities in one year: extremely positive feedback and requests for more copies.
• Developed South Africa’s first isiZulu and English WhatsApp diabetes education chatbot with input from South Africans with diabetes.
• Conducted a 9 province in-person feedback drive to assess the chatbot and determine what format education should be in.
• Reach over 157,000 people in annual diabetes awareness and stigma campaigns.
• Combined 38 years of lived experience with diabetes in our team.

Find out more about our education and community projects on https://sweetlife.org.za/ We can issue tax-deductible Section 18A certificates, and have a valid 2026 SED certificate.