Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator
South Africa has one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the world. This is compounded by decades of jobless growth and limited informal livelihood opportunities for young people.
Annually, approximately 1 million young people exit schooling and enter the labor market. These young people must try to navigate many broken and fragmented systems, trying to find a path from a poorly performing education system into a labor and entrepreneurship market shaped by jobless growth and massive disruption. Typically, only 1 in 3 youth find work or can continue their education. The others do their best to tirelessly look for opportunities in the face of scams, misleading adverts, and a dire lack of credible information – exacerbated by crippling search costs, high-priced internet access, and expensive public transport among other factors. The situation is particularly dire for young women, whose barriers to work-seeking are even more numerous and significant than those faced by young men, and who suffered most of the total job losses in South Africa due to the COVID pandemic.
Harambee works at the systems level, developing solutions to promote inclusive growth and reduce unemployment by identifying and creating jobs and work experiences for young people, breaking barriers for young people to access work, and linking young work-seekers to formal and informal work opportunities. Partnering with the government, the private sector, and other NGOs, as well as more than 2 million young people themselves (65% of whom are young women), Harambee catalyzes and helps deliver smart systemic reforms and improvements across economic sectors. They help to identify and address key structural barriers facing both youth and job creators and are building a national “pathway management” system that will allow millions of young people to more efficiently and effectively connect to quality opportunities and remain productively engaged.
To substantially increase the number of earning opportunities available to youth, Harambee and its partners enable and assist high-potential economic sectors to develop and implement effective growth strategies to catalyze earning opportunities in the formal and informal economy. This is done through the adoption of more inclusive hiring methods, using incentive instruments, lowering barriers, and improving support systems to unlock earning opportunities in the informal economy. In addition, support is provided to the government to transform the delivery of its public employment and training programs to create many more and better opportunities for youth. All these efforts are being undertaken with a focus on what is required to create high-quality earning opportunities for young women.
“Harambee’s partnership with Co-Impact has helped deepen our understanding of the systems that can have a transformative impact on youth unemployment in South Africa. Co-Impact has been committed thought partners throughout the process, providing valuable contributions and helping guide our approach to systems change. We are excited to partner with Co-Impact on this journey over the next five years.”
Sharmi Surianarain – Chief Impact Officer, Harambee
