- South Africa, unfortunately, stands out globally
as having one of the highest, if not the highest,
youth unemployment rate.
And probably the statistic that would shock you
is that our Statistician General has estimated
that roughly 40% of this generation of young people
will likely never work in their lifetime.
Harambee's best description is our title.
We are a youth employment accelerator.
And that means we partner with government,
we partner with business,
we partner with young people,
making the youth labor market work better,
making the investment that's being spent by many people
in workforce development in training and skills work better.
And in the end, get young people into more pathways
that are going to generate income for themselves
and for their families.
- The solution that became Harambee was a solution
that would solve problems on the demand and the supply side.
And therefore could gather momentum
both with employers and with young people.
So from the very outset, the thinking was
we're creating a labor market solution, not a project.
We're trying to design this thing in a way that could scale
and have impact at a population scale level
and across the economy.
And that meant we could attract government into the process
because rather than seeing it
as a sort of project to be funded,
they could see it as a solution to the challenge
that government was trying to solve.
- Who has received marketing calls before?
What I want to do now,
the first part of what we're going to do now
is I'm going to introduce you to some terminologies
that are going to be useful for the calls
that we are going to be listening to.
- At the moment, you've got a lot of young people
trapped in urban areas unable to access opportunities,
unable to afford the cost of job search.
They need to be networked,
they need to be pathway managed,
and at the same time you've got to do
what the private sector can't do by itself.
You've got to catalyze opportunities
in those economically-depressed areas.
And this is where Harambee and ourselves are entering
quite new territory by actively working
with firms that operate in our slum areas
and creating pathways for those firms
to evolve commercially and become local employers.
We are actively combining economic development
with youth workforce development
and connecting the two in a more structured way.
That's been missing historically.
- We started Harambee in a very traditional way,
which was to say, how do you get a group of businesses
to think differently about who they bring
into their environment and how they bring them in.
And so the idea was to say,
could we create a network that allowed those businesses
to find young people that were invisible to them?
- As a pathway manager, we use different tools to get data
of what young people are really good at.
And find the hidden potential,
as opposed to just the qualifications,
typical work experiences.
So we then use different algorithms
and teams that look at that data to match them
and to give them a leg-up on the opportunities
that they would have never been visible for.
- Harambee has got a number of roles that applies.
One of which is, as a labor market change agent.
And it has a huge ability to influence the way
people access work and, in our industry,
entry-level work has been a bit of a constraint to growth.
And so over the years we've established
a closer and closer relationship with Harambee's
excluded youth as a skilled pool into the BPO sector.
- You have absolutely no control over the customer's accent,
you have no control over the customer's length of speech.
So you need to be equipped to handle that.
- What's been really interesting is that
the speeds to productivity of these learners coming out
of Harambee has actually not been any different
to the speeds of productivity of experienced staff.
In fact they've been more willing to learn,
to put in the extra time.
It's been a fantastic story for us.
- Harambee prepares you.
They teach you focus,
they teach you how to channel your energy,
what is it that you need to do
when you get into a work place.
I do meet a lot of unemployed people.
My best advice to them is go to Harambee.
It gets you ready for the world of work.
- We're just trying to change our society,
we're trying to change our country.
And in doing that, we think, have something that we can say
to the rest of the African continent and the rest of world.