“The problem we are trying to solve is continuously changing. It’s very dynamic,” says Mosuoe Sekonyela, the Chief Government Relations Officer at Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator, chatting to Public Sector Leaders about their work, and approaches to the youth unemployment crisis.

Inspired and motivated by the 3.8 million young people they support on the SA Youth platform, and the prospect of building systems that are operable, Mosuoe believes the barriers and challenges in the labour market can be solved through collaboration between various stakeholders, such as government and businesses.

“We are an organisation that seeks to accelerate youth employment. We do this through partnering with a whole range of stakeholders and society, to unlock jobs, and ultimately to dismantle any barriers that make it difficult for young people to access jobs,” explains Mosuoe.

Harambee’s work is threefold. They operate sayouth.mobi, a national skilling and recruitment technology platform, on behalf of the Department of Employment and Labour as part of the Presidential Youth Employment Initiative. Almost 4 million young people have been actively supported on the platform.

“The second piece is that we partner with others in business and government, civil society, to aggregate jobs and unlock new jobs and earning opportunities. Then we make them visible for young people on this platform.” The third aspect of their work involves generating research and insights using data to inform approaches to bring down barriers to accessing jobs and the labour market.

Mosuoe says that in order to strengthen education and skills development there needs to be alignment between the skills that businesses need and what skills young people are being equipped with, especially for the future.

“What are the kinds of jobs that we’re going to need three, five years from now? It’s quite important that we start skilling for those jobs now,” says Mosuoe. One of the challenges young people face is the high cost of looking for a job.

“We made it free for young people to search, so young people can sit at home, can be doing childcare duty and still be able to apply, to bring down that barrier – the high cost of looking for a job.”

They’ve gone even further and use an algorithm to match job seekers with opportunities that are close to where they live. Along with accelerating youth employment is a need to encourage young people to become entrepreneurs and considering how difficult it is, Mosuoe explains that we need to grapple with the practicalities of promoting entrepreneurship.

The government, whether it be at the national, provincial or local level, Harambee has a broad range of only partners.

“We work with a lot of civil society organisations, community-based organisations who often come up and take the role of supporting young people not only from a scaling point of view, but also in terms of other social issues that young people end up having to deal with by virtue of being at home, without work – like drug abuse and mental health issues – so I think it’s been quite critical to see that holistic support of young people,” says Mosuoe.

Beyond the statistics, which help track progress in reaching the youth employment targets, Mosuoe highlights the value of the more qualitative markers and giving communities agency.

“I think what’s important is that we have a narrative, almost the anecdotal, qualitative stories that help us tell a much broader story of what decent work looks like in this country. How are our communities working to solve their own problems, which cuts across society and is not just about an intervention?”

With a passionate, nuanced approach, Harambee is working hard to solve one of the country’s biggest challenges.