This Youth Month, SOS Children’s Villages continues to call for concerted efforts in upskilling and supporting youth.
As we continue to commemorate Youth Month, SOS Children’s Villages South Africa (SOS SA) reinforces the importance of investing in youth education, training and skills development.
Many young South Africans face hostile conditions in school-to-work transitions irrespective of their education level. Some of these young people become disillusioned with the labour market and they revert to doing nothing to increase, or to update their skills through education and training. The school-to-work transition has been further hindered by the Covid pandemic.
The YouthCan! programme at SOS aims to help young people transition into the world of work. Corporate partnerships are leveraged to support young people to successfully manage this transition from school to independent adulthood. In this programme, they are each mentored, and they are given work placement opportunities.
SOS SA have dedicated Youth Development Coordinators at each programme, who are responsible for youth development and support, in order to ensure that these young people are able to transition into independent living, and become contributing members of society. They guide young people in shaping their futures.
SOS SA and its corporate partners have actively contributed to a skilled youth force with these initiatives:
- African Youth Mentorship Programme has 20 young people in its programme.
- KPMG took 1 SOS youth into a learnership programme
- Continental Tyres took 7 youth from Cape Town, PE and Mthatha into a learnership programme
- NYDA and SEDA gave entrepreneurship training for 50 youth
- Siyaya Skills Institute provided learnership opportunities for 7 youth in partnership with
- SAYES provided face to face mentorship to 12 young people from Cape Town.
- AkzoNobel assisted 72 youth from (Sekhukhune, Mthata, Qwa Qwa, Nelspruit and Mathanjana) to get drivers licences, in order to reach independence.
58 youth are working permanently since last year because of YouthCan! (15 Mechanical engineers, 3 mining engineer, 10 retail stores, 5 transport industry, 15 farm workers and 10 construction)
YouthCan! has exposed over 450 young people to vocational training opportunities such as hairdressing, hospitality skills, painting and interior designing, since 2017.
SOS SA Calls for more partnerships to advance the interests of youth in the country. To support these initiatives and for more information, please go to https://www.sossouthafrica.org.za/.
