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Shifting South Africa’s complex and concerning challenge of youth unemployment

YES has recently reached the milestone of 1,000,000 job opportunities. It is beginning to show success in shifting South Africa’s complex and concerning challenge of youth unemployment.

Nedbank’s Youth Employment Services (YES) programme is the largest programme in the financial services sector, and has involved 7,000 young people, and counting, with two cohorts starting in June 2023 and next month (July 2023). An impactful initiative, YES was launched by President Cyril Ramaphosa, and the first cohorts kicked off the programme in 2019. It is a neat fit for Nedbank, whose core purpose is to use our financial expertise to do good – for society as a whole, to play our part as a responsive corporate.

Ntanga Madzivhandila, who joined the YES-programme at Nedbank just a year ago, has a story that really embodies the best possible success through this programme. Ntanga has spent this last year building the foundations of what is bound to be an incredible career – from scratch a year ago, to his recent appointment as a specialist (manager-level) at Group-level. We’re so proud of him.

Nedbank will be sharing a series of stories of YES4Youth rising stars that show our unique implementation of YES and how it has impacted the lives of our YES-youths. These inspiring young South Africans have grabbed the opportunity of one year’s work experience, skills development, and mentorship, and used this to change their lives, and support households on their monthly stipends. More broadly, we hope that this programme is a game-changing start to South Africa addressing the vexing challenge of youth unemployment in our country.

The impact of the YES Programme:
Since Nedbank kicked off our YES-programme (the first cohort began in 2019), we have cumulatively created 7000 work experience opportunities for young individuals, including at partner enterprises. This is the largest corporate participant in the financial services sector, and one of the largest participating companies – second to a national retailer. Nedbank’s commitment to the initiative is also evident in the impressive absorption rate of YES participants into permanent roles or continued employment contracts upon completion of the program, which currently stands at an exceptional 12%. This rate significantly surpasses the statutory target of 2.5% and highlights the program’s ability to create meaningful and sustainable career opportunities for those who participate in our programme. Nedbank’s focus has been on training YES-youth for the jobs of the future, particularly focused on our Green Economy strategy, including training our YES-youth to work on solar energy projects etc.

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