Creating employment prospects for young people with digital skills

Project description

Title: Digital Skills for Jobs and Income in South Africa
Commissioned by: German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ)
Country: South Africa
Lead executing agency: Department of Communications and Digital Technologies (DCDT)
Overall term: 2020 to 2024

Context

South Africa has one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the world. This affects young women in particular, who find it especially difficult to gain a foothold in the labour market as a result of various factors. At the same time, companies lack well-trained experts in the digital sector.

The underlying reasons for this are varied. There is not only a shortage of initial and further training courses in digital skills, but teaching staff themselves have not yet received adequate training. The situation is further compounded by a lack of practical learning opportunities and a labour market beset with structural problems.

Objective

Young people, especially young women, have better employment prospects in the digitalised economy.

Approach

The project promotes digital skills and makes it easier for South African young people to enter the labour market.

To achieve this, young people learn a range of skills currently in demand. About 2,000 young people are able to participate in innovative, informal training measures. These include training courses for drone pilots and creative content producers as well as for app developers and cloud practitioners. Digital training is also provided to experts for contact centres and on the topic of outsourcing business processes (with financial participation by KLM Empowered).

In order to improve the needs-based vocational training at selected vocational schools, the project carried out an evaluation of the schools' digital maturity. These schools are now training an additional 1,000 students and 1,300 teachers in digital skills.

The project also works to standardise recruitment procedures at 150 medium-sized enterprises: HR experts are now implementing digital, gender-sensitive approaches.

Moreover, these measures support efforts to enhance networking and cooperation between initiatives and to encourage the exchange of experiences on the digital transformation process.

The project is partly funded by the G20 initiative #eSkills4Girls, which aims to overcome the gender digital divide.

Last update: August 2022