Work for work: Youth employability in South Africa
17 November 2015
Work for work: Youth employability in South Africa
Thu, 19 Nov 2015 | By Sarah Marquet
Harambee is training thousands of young people a year, giving them employability skills and placing them in jobs they would otherwise have been locked out of due to lack of skills or experience. And having grown from a partnership with four companies in 2011 to 200 this year, the enterprise is receiving international attention.
\Hollard Insurance was one of the founding members and its head of group corporate affairs Gail Walters tells Recruiter the motivation for Harambee — which means ‘work for work’ in Swahili — was threefold: to improve the employability of young people, increase the labour pool and increase access to work for people both within the Hollard group and further afield.
Harambee provides a 90-day bridging programme in which the trainees, or ‘harambees’, are taught work-ready expertise such as computer skills, financial literacy, numeracy, what kinds of clothes to wear, what kind of language to use, and so on. It then pairs the young person with one of the 200 partner companies that span 11 sectors including hospitality, retail, manufacturing, mining and financial services. The companies make a commitment to help employ that young person for a minimum of a year, with the potential for it becoming permanent.
“And that’s where you increase the employability of those people going forward, because research has shown if a person can stay in employment in their first job for a year, it increases their chances of remaining in employment throughout their lifetime,” Walters says.
She describes Harambee as “a conduit between the market, the labour pool of young, unemployed, disadvantaged work-seekers, and employers that are looking to employ people in entry level jobs”.
Statistics South Africa puts the national unemployment rate at 25% and Walters says it is even higher for 18-24-year-olds, which is why Harambee is targeting that age group. The World Economic Forum estimates one in three young South Africans is unemployed.
The Rockefeller Foundation, which was already working to help provide jobs for young people in Africa via its Digital Jobs Africa initiative, this year announced a series of investments over two years and worth US$3m (£2m) to help Harambee scale up the programme, according to the foundation’s website Walters says the Harambee programme was also recently presented to the Clinton Global Initiative, part of the Clinton Foundation, among other initiatives.
Harambee expects to have placed 20,000 young people into work by the end of this year with an ongoing annual target of 10,000. By 2020, it hopes to have helped 500,000 people.
Walters explains Hollard specifically, though probably other companies too, is continually monitoring the programme to see what is affecting retention of the young people — social integration into the workforce, for example — and what other skills need ‘bridging’.
FROM DECEMBER 2015'S RECRUITER MAGAZINE
UK firms and recruiters interested in getting involved with or starting up their own employability programmes could do worse than look at the Harambee model in South Africa.Harambee is training thousands of young people a year, giving them employability skills and placing them in jobs they would otherwise have been locked out of due to lack of skills or experience. And having grown from a partnership with four companies in 2011 to 200 this year, the enterprise is receiving international attention.
\Hollard Insurance was one of the founding members and its head of group corporate affairs Gail Walters tells Recruiter the motivation for Harambee — which means ‘work for work’ in Swahili — was threefold: to improve the employability of young people, increase the labour pool and increase access to work for people both within the Hollard group and further afield.
Harambee provides a 90-day bridging programme in which the trainees, or ‘harambees’, are taught work-ready expertise such as computer skills, financial literacy, numeracy, what kinds of clothes to wear, what kind of language to use, and so on. It then pairs the young person with one of the 200 partner companies that span 11 sectors including hospitality, retail, manufacturing, mining and financial services. The companies make a commitment to help employ that young person for a minimum of a year, with the potential for it becoming permanent.
“And that’s where you increase the employability of those people going forward, because research has shown if a person can stay in employment in their first job for a year, it increases their chances of remaining in employment throughout their lifetime,” Walters says.
She describes Harambee as “a conduit between the market, the labour pool of young, unemployed, disadvantaged work-seekers, and employers that are looking to employ people in entry level jobs”.
Statistics South Africa puts the national unemployment rate at 25% and Walters says it is even higher for 18-24-year-olds, which is why Harambee is targeting that age group. The World Economic Forum estimates one in three young South Africans is unemployed.
The Rockefeller Foundation, which was already working to help provide jobs for young people in Africa via its Digital Jobs Africa initiative, this year announced a series of investments over two years and worth US$3m (£2m) to help Harambee scale up the programme, according to the foundation’s website Walters says the Harambee programme was also recently presented to the Clinton Global Initiative, part of the Clinton Foundation, among other initiatives.
Harambee expects to have placed 20,000 young people into work by the end of this year with an ongoing annual target of 10,000. By 2020, it hopes to have helped 500,000 people.
Walters explains Hollard specifically, though probably other companies too, is continually monitoring the programme to see what is affecting retention of the young people — social integration into the workforce, for example — and what other skills need ‘bridging’.
