CIARAN RYAN: The Youth Employment Service, YES, is a South African not-for-profit [organisation]. It is a joint national initiative between business, government and labour that aims to address the youth unemployment crisis in South Africa by providing 12-month quality work experiences to unemployed black youth.
That was the focus of it. And the idea was let’s have something that is private-sector based. So at YES we work with the private sector then to get youth into their first job. It’s an incentive scheme, so it’s a hundred percent funded by the private sector; there is no government money at all. So that was the idea of looking at youth and jobs, based through the private sector.
Of course, the youth work for the company, so they go back and they get experience in the company. But we also offer – for those companies that really can’t host the youth internally – we have a sort of a turnkey solution where we place the youth into other high-impact jobs as well. So there are actually quite a few benefits for the partner company.
We found that when a person has a reference letter from a good programme, it makes them three times more employable than someone who doesn’t.In those stats you mentioned earlier about the thousands of people who have got jobs, that’s about R4 billion that’s gone to them as salaries, which they would spend to support their families and themselves, and so on.
We find about 40% or 42% absorption rates in the immediate aftermath of the 12-month period, which is higher than pretty much any other programme that we’ve come across. Then, obviously beyond that, because of … the skills and so on, there are more opportunities even after that. The final absorption is probably going to be north of 40%.
We are definitely a measurable outcome towards your social or sustainable-development goal, so you would score points there. And in terms of ESG, environmental, social and governance scorecards … asset managers and investors want [this] more and more even if you didn’t have BEE as a focus.