Youth Unemployment is Solvable

is going to be globally and locally sustainable. South Africa has one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the world. Nikola's organization, the Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator, says that about forty percent of this generation of eighteen to thirty four year olds are expected to never secure stable work. Imagine what that does to an individual, and then imagine that it's happening to forty percent of young people in your country.

The impact is enormous, not only on the individual's well being in health, but imagine the loss of potential, missing out on the skills and energy of these people who really should be shaping the country's future. In South Africa. That lack of opportunity is still skewed by the legacy of apartheid and now alongside rapid globalization, which has left

many young people geographically removed from job opportunities. You see, under apartheid, non whites were forcibly moved to areas far from city centers and not inequality endures today in the time and money people have to spend traveling even to

find work. A twenty sixteen study found that young unemployed people spend five hundred and sixty rand that's around thirty eight dollars per month searching for work, and that's more than the average per person income of the households our guest Today, Nikola Gilambic is tackling the issue head on. She's trying to bridge the gap between the skills unemployed young people have and the skills potential employers are looking for.

Harambi is working on all sides of the problem. They're working with the government to create jobs in tourism, conservation and in building a green economy. They're also training unemployed people, and they're training employers so that the employers can look beyond paper qualifications and see real life skills. It's cool how they work. Nicola uses face to face methods coupled with big data and that work is now spreading beyond

South Africa. Okay, let's listen to Nicola now in conversation with an Applebaum, can you describe to me the problem in a nutshell? What is the problem that you're trying to solve. South Africa has one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the world, and that has multiple dimensions. Firstly, our economy is just not producing enough jobs and all most likely never produce enough jobs to absorb the young

people that we have. Secondly, we have an education system that is not preparing young people for the world of work. And Thirdly, we have massive inequality in South Africa. So even the opportunities that do exist in the economy are not accessible for young people from poor households who don't have the social networks or the means to access those opportunities.

Why is this such an important problem to solve? So if we talk about global inequality and sustainability, households around the world have to feel that young people can transision into an economy and provide for families. Otherwise we just do not have a stable social core. So it's really vital that young people feel that they can progress. Young

people feel they have opportunity. Young people feel they have mobility in society, both in order to sustain social cohesion as well as to actually grow productive economies into the future. And in South Africa today, as I think is becoming the fact in many economies around the world, young people who should be an asset as the working age population,

are actually trapped outside of the economy. When one looks at a problem like youth unemployment, which in South Africa is much higher than it is in many other parts of the world, how does someone like you begin to tackle it? How do you break the problem down in your head? So we've decided to be really pragmatic actually

insolving the problem. The first starting point was to understand where, in fact are opportunities in the economy and where are they today and where are they likely to be in future. And then to understand who are the young people that we have, what is their actual educational and readiness for work, and what are they capable of? What are their assets,

what are their attributes? And how might we match the young people we have and the opportunities we have in a better way, And where we find gaps, what is the shortest, quickest and most efficient way to close those gaps, not falling back on the traditional models of needing to send people to university for multiple years or needing to

create entirely new jobs. Is Can we work with young people to close gaps in a much more agile way, to judge their potential in new ways, to be able to see attributes that they have that might be suitable for existing jobs. Can we also work with employers to change the way they're higher Can we change the way

employers judge the potential of young people? Could you give some examples of what you found when, for example, when you looked at young people, what were they lacking and what was that you can give them that wasn't already available through the educational system. So, when we worked with employers in some growing areas of the economy, like global business services, back office processing, and banking, employers still today, despite tech, we're hiring people into those jobs and we're

tending to seek graduates for those jobs. And we were like, well, do those jobs rarely require graduates? They were also running mathematics tests for a number of those jobs as screeners, and we're screening people out in South Africa, most young people and especially those from poor families will not have studied mathematics at school and will not have performed well

in mathematics. When you actually looked at the jobs, they didn't require mathematics and they certainly didn't require university degrees. Employers were just using those as screening proxies. So what we were able to do is then look at the young people and say, well, what do I need to be a really great call center agent or what do I need to be a really good customer service facing individual? And of course what they're needed was great conversational competence.

What they needed was to be well versed in English. What they needed was to be able to multitask on a computer. And all three of those actually maybe things well. So in the case of conversational competence, that may be an attribute they already have. In the case of learning to multitask on a computer, it may be a case of I've never seen a computer, but I've got a high learning potential and if you give me one, I'll

learn really quickly. And in the case of practicing English, that's an opportunity to speak to somebody who speaks English

rather than going back to school. So you know what we were able to do is then partner with the government to try and redirect some of the training spending that's happening in government, some of the skills money that is being in fact, vast amounts that are being spent by both government and the private sector on training young people that isn't relevant to the work that's available, and that just frustrates them further because they spend their own

money and their own time and the government's money being trained and still don't actually have the basic competencies they need for the jobs that are available. So what we've been trying to do is find these short solutions, quick solutions, much more efficient solutions that give young people just the leg up they need to get into their first opportunities and make their way to get a foothold in the economy.

Can you give me a specific example of a kind of short term program or solution, maybe an individual that you've met, and what kind of training do you mean in the short term? So, for example, some of the programs are a few days long to prepare somebody for

customer service roles where they haven't been customers themselves. They come from a poor family and they haven't had the opportunity to just kind of engage with strangers and communicate in English with rangers, and a lot of that is just about the confidence to find one's voice and engage, particularly in English. Many of them have been sitting at home unemployed and just getting used to the fact that they have to stand on their feet all day. Comes

a really important part of the training. It's a simulation of the work that prepares people to behave in a

different way. Getting ready to actually and make a plan at home to get places on time is actually something, you know, punctuality something employers really really value to think it's most likely to get a young person fired in South Africa is not arriving on time, but actually navigating transport systems in big cities when you're poor is a difficult process, especially if you've got childcare concerns as well. So a lot of our training is not really training.

A lot of it is behavioral simulation. A lot of it is preparing young people to be ready to take on the challenges that that world of work will present

for them. So that's like a simple example in retail, But other one you know would be you know, when I say a short program, perhaps an eight week program where I am practicing and improving my written English communication, or I am practicing my spoken English communication, I am demonstrating problem solving capabilities that would be relevant in the

financial services job that I'm going to go into. And a third example would be perhaps a six month program where I'm actually, despite the fact that I didn't do or succeed in mathematics at school, I'm actually born to code, and somebody has found that out about me and they're now are going to put me through a coding boot camp which is not just going to accelerate me into coding despite my absence of good schooling, but also going to give me the kind of behavioral readiness to work

in teams, to collaborate, to problem solve in the way that I'm going to need to do when I land in a junior programming role. How do you work with employers? How do you change their prejudices about young people and who would be a good person to hire and who is that a kind of a training course they have

to go through as well? You know, the change management journey with employers is probably the hardest part of this journey, and some of the tactics that we've employed over the last seven years that have really paid off is understanding that employers are most influenced by other employers, and so Harumby started with some early adopter employers who agreed to create the proofpoint and then also to be advocates with other employers about the fact that this cohort of young

people could demonstrate the potential to do these jobs, could perform in these jobs. What we were able to do also was right from the outset, gather a lot of data and create the evidence space that we needed to be able to demonstrate this evidence of this that the young people could meet certain benchmarks in terms of their

psychometric and competence potential. So a combination of a lot of relationship based change management work with employers as well as data and evidence to back this up, I think has allowed us to go from having five employers as partners at the outset to now having over five hundred employers who on a routine basis are accessing young people from this pool. Can you give me some idea of the effectiveness of the program? How do you know that

this is working? So I think the first thing is that Harrambian now is starting to operate as system scale. So we have half a million young people in the Harrambian network and are going to have one and a

half million young people in the network by twenty twenty two. Also, by that time, it will mean that for every cohort of young people exiting the schooling system or the education system every year, that the large percentage of those that would normally fall out into not being in education, training or employment by the end of the first year will now be on a pathway. They will be in a positive network, they will be improving their employability, and they

will be getting access to information about opportunities. So that is a system scale solution for the country. Harambee is in partnership with the Greatest City region of Johannesburg around being a clearinghouse for unemployed people across the city, and I think that that model is a replicable one and is also being adopted nationally by the national government to work in tandem with the Department of Labor to manage

the pathways of young people from learning to earning. And I think that as the Harambee platform becomes a scalable to the system, we're also seeing the dramatic impact that it can have. It doesn't just translate into more young

people from poorer household accessing available opportunities. We're also able to start working with growth sectors, different industries that are growing, new job families that are growing, and to be able to almost plan ahead how we can prepare colds of young people for the jobs of the future, and to be able to match them to areas or parts of the country on a place based basis where we can say, you know, we're going to grow these industries here, how

do we get the young people here ready for those jobs? And so that allows us to, in a very kind of agile way as a country, start to at least the growth that we do have, make it work for our young people and particularly our poor young people. So imagine there's a young person in South Africa who's finished school, who's unemployed, who wants to be employed. What exactly are the steps that he has to go through in order to get a job and how does he find out

about you? How does he what does he access a website? Do you find him? How does it work? So young people can access Harambi and mostly word through a mobile platform which doesn't require a smartphone or a lot of data. It's pretty much free and for them to apply to Harrumbi, they will get called back and we find that while we gather a lot of data from them on the mobile phone, it's really important to have somebody interacting with

them in person. They really appreciate somebody taking the time to understand them better, to understand their circumstance better, and to make a connection with them. And having made that connection, we're then able to sustain that connection through the mobile network and through ongoing interactions with young people who get offered things over time depending on where they are, what

their attributes are. So they will be given a range of assessments and those assessments will tell us a lot about their eligibility for different kinds of roles in the economy. But we're trying to use assessments that are not traditional ones. We're trying to use assessment that don't exclude young people based on their education qualifications, that don't exclude young people based on their poverty and social circumstance, but that rather can go through those and see the potential of young

people their attributes. You know, it may be that what employers will say is we're looking for grits and resourcefulness

and problem solving. Well, a young person who's been struggling to stay in school and get themselves through school, responsible for many things in a poor household, and dealing with financial issues day to day has demonstrated a huge amount of grits and resourcefulness, which if we are able to capture that and demonstrate that in the profile of that young person, may mean that an employer can really see their potential and understand that they can be an asset

in the workplace. So Harrumpies process involves a lot of new proxies and new assessments that we're using to judge

young people's potential. If they stay in the network, they can also grow their profile, so they will be nudge and encouraged to improve things about themselves or gain elements of their profile that would strengthen their likelihood to succeed in the economy if they're eligible for and could access an opportunity, for example, that required them to have conversational English, like a great tourism job or a job in a call center, which in a South African context would be

a high quality job for these young people. You know, can we nudge them to an opportunity near where they live where they could practice their English. Can we link them to an opportunity to retake one module of mathematics if they were going into or eligible for a job

that really did require that. Could we take their theoretical qualification as an electrician and give them an opportunity to visit an institution where they could actually apply what they've learned for the first time, because they won't have had

that opportunity before. So these are very practical nudges and opportunities that we would constantly provide to those young people to what we call bring them closer to work, and then have them in this very sophisticated data driven network that also then has demand side intelligence, knows about all the jobs that are available in the economy and in the geographies in which these young people live, and are able to match them and link them to those opportunities

on an ongoing basis. So your process is really quite individualized. You have teams of people who work for you, who are accustomed to speaking to young people across a wide range of very wide range of languages and cultures in

South Africa and then personalizing a program for them. Although we have half a million young people in the network we talk about it's you know, it's five hundred thousand cohorts of one, and every individual in the network should feel like they're on their own personal journey, that there are young people at the other end of a call that can speak to them, that understand and have empathy with their circumstance, who until fairly recently were in the

same position as them and have now made it into the economy and can guide and advise them. And they should feel like the profile that they receive and the advice and nudges that they get are highly relevant and appropriate to them as an individual and to their personal circumstance where they live, the kind of household they're in, the kind of financial means that they have, the kind of transport systems they can access, and the kind of school that they went to, and that what's on offer

should feel highly personalized for them. But obviously, to do that, we've had to build very scalable systems, which include taken cloud based systems that enable us to gather a lot of intelligence that enables us to provide a really quality service to individuals, as as well as a national call center which means we can actually have personalized interaction with young people over the phone, and then in community services, in partnerships with government and community organizations, where we can

extend services and opportunities to young people that are local to where they live. It's fascinating as a kind of combination of some very old fashioned thinking, you know, one to one speak to the person individually, with very high tech collection of data so that you know where the jobs are in their area and so on. Exactly. I mean, I think we fundamentally believe that people need to interact with other people, and in fact, we've built a network

because they need peer networks. They need people to care about them. They need to feel that somebody is seeing them, and you can't achieve that just with a tech platform.

On the other hand, the tech platform enables us to do things that simply would not be possible at scale if we were just running a kind of high touch, personalized service, not just the data that we're able to gather both on the demand and the supply side, but also to once you've made a connection with somebody's stay in communication with them through a tech platform that is not just scalable but highly affordable. Is this a system

that you think could be taken to other countries. Does this just work for South Africa or do you envision it working in other reports of Africa or in the world. I definitely think it has application beyond South Africa. We have recently begun the process of applying the model in Rwanda in partnership with the government there and MasterCard Foundation and others, and we have had a tremendous amount of interest from other parts of Africa, but also other parts

of the world. I think the world has caught up with us on this future of work problem and also of the problem of young people in particularly poor young or being excluded from the economy. I definitely think that the solutions that we're building have great relevance globally. The way we're assessing potential, the way we're managing demands supply matching on a much more real time and agile basis, and the way we're breaking through some of the barriers

of the education system. I think we'll have relevance way beyond South Africa, probably globally. So give me an example of how your program might change the life of one individual. So let me tell you about Cindy and She lives in a poor township outside of Cape Town in South Africa, member of a fairly large family. No one in the family's working, single mom. She has a young child of

her own and the child is not in daycare. The family kind of is scrounding around food on a daily basis, accessing some government grants pretty much run out by the end of the month, and so in that circumstance, Indie manages to hear about the her rumby Youth Employment Accelerator. She accesses her RUBY through her mobile phone and came in by all our assessments a really high potential individual.

She just was off the charts in her psychometric profile for the world of work and in her learning potential and ability to learn quickly. So she was successful in accessing a two month bridging program which prepare her for a care center job at a premier health insurer in South Africa. And one of the days on the training program,

she was late. And it's a real kind of issue on the training program to be late, because punctiality is one of the most important and valued issues on the training program, and she was like ten minutes late, and it turned out that she had been mugged on the way to the program, had everything stolen from her. She was very anxious about her child, and the whole situation

been really terrible. She was most concerned that she was ten minutes late for the program because she just saw this as her ticket and her chance to shift the trajectory of her life and that of her child. She stayed on the program, and Stall a few years later successfully landed and has kept her job at She's now actually been promoted in this job at this insurance company.

One of the things that Cindy talks about, which I find most powerful, is the transformation that landing this what by many people in the global norse might seem like not a fantastic job, but in her world, is a completely transformative job. It's stable income. It means that the cash flows in the family can be relied on. It means that her daughter is nine daycare and in an early learning program. It means that the food that the

family's eating is more nutritious and more regular. And she has chosen not to leave her family and leave her community, but rather stay there and be a role model to other girls in her community about the progress that they can make. And she is an outstanding example of the five hundred thousand, but she is just an example because we have Cindies throughout our network. How does one go about funding a program like this? It must be very expensive.

So one of the reasons her Rumby has been so successful and has scaled as much as it has is because it is fundamentally built on a partnership between different employers, government, private sector, donors, and global aid organizations all working together,

and everybody is contributing their peace. You know, employers are paying fees to recruit to young people, the government is able to subsidize the process of scaling the services for young people, and donors and private sector as well are able to contribute to the innovations and developing some of the solutions that are needed to be scaled. And I think that it's it's in that magic mix that we've been able to create something that can not just scale

but also endear. So for people listening, people who are concerned about global unemployment, maybe in your community, maybe in their own communities, what can they do? What can an individual do to help and effort like yours? Well, I mean, I think advocacy with employers is really important because employers are a key piece of the puzzle and are using very exclusionary tools to assess young people and their potential and are stuck in quite traditional ways of recruiting and

managing human capital. And I think we need a breakthrough in the way employers behave and a much more inclusive approach to hiring. So anybody who's in a position to be a great advocate for that within business, I think

would be a tremendous asset to this process. I think the second thing is is that governments need to think differently about human capital and about the deployment of government resources in ways that unlock the potential of young people, rather than just fund legacy education, training and higher education institutions that may actually sort of be barriers to young people growing their human capital and participating in the economy. So people who can exercise influence in those worlds, and

I think that's a great area of advocacy. And then of course it's just people working with young people or people who are young people gaining the confidence and a new sense of self which is not blinkered by all the traditional ways of measuring their value and their readiness to contribute to community, to society and to the economy. And I think awakening young people to what they are capable of, what value they bring and how they can

be contributed. Any young people who can lead other young people in feeling and believing that, I think will be a tremendous essage. Nikola Glambic does not mince her words. Scaling up the work of Harambe and ensuring South Africa's have the right to dignified work. That will take a lot of changes. Employers need to change, the government needs to value human capital in different and better way, and young people need to understand what they're capable of and

just how important they are. Also the functionality thing. Yikes, poor Cindy. I'm so glad to hear she's doing well today. There is huge potential and a huge need for Nicola and Harambi's model to spread. The International Labor Organization says that in twenty eighteen, youth unemployment globally it was three times the rate of adult unemployment. So it's regarded as a global crisis and Harambi as a solvable well it

could be used all over the world. Solvable is a collaboration between Pushkin Industries and the Rockefella Foundation, with production by Laura Hyde, Hester Kant, Laura Sheeter, and Ruth Barnes from Chalk and Blade. Pushkin's executive producer is Neia LaBelle, Research by Sheer, Vincent, engineering by Jason Gambrell and the great Folks at GSI Studios. Original music composed by Pascal Wise and special thanks to Maggie Taylor, Heather Fine, Julia Barton,

Carli mcgliori, Jacob Weisberg, and Malcolm Gladwell. You can learn more about solving today's biggest problems at Rockefella Foundation dot org, slash Solvable, I'm Mave Higgins now ghost Solve It. Try to be