Written by Awo Ablo
Last week, I was lucky enough to be in conversation with Kuben Nair, Chief Technology Officer at Harambee in South Africa — one of our earliest program partners at Co-Impact. Our conversation started by unpacking the role of philanthropy in an era of disruption, but soon became an illuminating discussion about hustle, partnership, and why it is sometimes okay for funders to be a little “frustrating” — spoiler alert: only when they are true thought partners, guiding rather than directing!
This conversation took place at a co-hosted event with WIRED in London, at a time when SXSW had brought many tech leaders to town. This event also served as a follow up to our recent feature – in case you missed it, you can read the article here.
Our conversation began with Kuben sharing the story of Palesa, a young South African woman who had been job hunting for six years! When she came to Harambee, the formal employment history on her CV was almost blank. But when Kuben asked what she had done after school, she explained that she had saved money, bought cosmetics wholesale, repackaged them into smaller units people could afford, sold them in her community, and later offered make-up advice to customers. In other words: market awareness, sales, customer service, budgeting, marketing, and enterprise. She had the skills, but her “hustle” was not framed in a way that employers understood. With Harambee’s support, Palesa was placed and got the job she had sought for so long.
Kuben was screening Palesa in person for employability and sector matching. This was great but with one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the world, Kuben and Harambee needed to make it scaleable. That is where their landmark employment platform, SA Youth came in. Palesa and millions of young South Africans can now visit their SAYouth.mobi. With no data costs, they can build profiles and complete assessments measuring their skills, potential, resilience, and communication. An inclusive matching algorithm ranks candidates and connects them to nearby opportunities, with support available through Harambee’s toll-free call centre. Employers, in turn, gain access to richer candidate profiles than a typical CV alone can provide.
Here are some other insights from Kuben that I wanted to share with you:
- Technology helps, but it can’t solve everything. That’s where partnerships come in. The digital platform is critical, but sadly, there is no app called “Let’s all get together across government, employers, young people, and social enterprises to fix the labour market”! This is why Harambee also works upstream with the private sector and government to create new jobs. Their engagement with the global business services sector — aka the business process outsourcing sector — helped align the industry and government around the creation of 150,000 net new jobs, 20% of which went to young people through inclusive hiring practices. Now, there is a new target of creating 500,000 jobs by 2030, with 30% going to young people.
- Strategic support can be as important as capital in helping organisations deliver change at scale. To help organisations like Harambee scale, funders should also be collaborative thought partners who can help organisations through the complexities of shifting from program delivery to systems change. Kuben described the strategic support from Co-Impact as “sometimes frustrating in the early days”, but it helped them see things differently and question their assumptions about what levers they needed to pull to have the most impact. Ultimately, they felt that this led to a much stronger systems change strategy and set them up for success in making that shift as an entire organisation.
- Local context, deep knowledge and expertise are great reasons to support locally-led and locally-rooted organisations. This matters if you care about having an impact that embeds and endures. After Kuben spoke, we had great questions from a global audience — many of whom rightly congratulated Harambee for their innovation and achievements. They then asked why the “hustle” or entrepreneurial mindset that encourages young people to start their own businesses is embraced in the UK or USA but is seen as less attractive than “just getting a job” in South Africa. Kuben shared an important contextual point. South Africa has a very healthy formal sector but an underdeveloped informal economy and culture for entrepreneurship that means what we’d term as start-up culture is seen as just what you do to survive before getting a formal job. There are many reasons for that — policy, regulation and cultural norms all play a part. Knowing this and designing for it is why Harambee and local organisations are such great partners.
As countries across the world face the challenge of youth unemployment, Harambee offers important insights on how to spot and support young people’s talents so that opportunity can be unlocked at scale. Do please reach out if you’d like to learn more about their work!