“Uniting Against Youth Unemployment with the Youth Employment Service (YES)”
Leanne Emery Hunter, YES Chief Marketing and Client Officer and Farai Mubaiwa, YES chief
Partnerships Officer were in conversation with Sharon Constançon, Chairman, SACC UK
talking about the Youth Unemployment in South Africa.
Leanne explained what the Youth Employment Service (YES)do. They are a joint national
initiative between business, labour, and government that seeks out ground-breaking ways to
enable work opportunities for unemployed youth. YES approaches the private sector to
create these opportunities, either inside their own businesses, or externally through YES-
vetted host partners such as IT Varsity. In exchange for doing so, corporate partners receive
up to two B-BBEE levels up on their scorecard, and can integrate their YES programmes
into their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) strategies.
Leanne informed the audience that since being founded just over three years ago, over
2,200 corporate partners have signed on to YES to co-create a future that works. YES has
created over 82,000 quality work experiences for youth, injecting over R4.6 billion into the
economy through YES Youth salaries alone. Over 700 B-BBEE level up have already been
achieved.
Leanne and Farai said over the next year, they plan on expanding their offering beyond B-
BBEE, which includes ESG and Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) integration through
the YES host partner model (turnkey solution). They are also looking to continue working
with their implementation partners (IPs), such as ITVarsity who were also part of the
webinar, to create work opportunities in even more future-facing industries, such as global
business services, drones, green economies, creative, digital, mining; along with essential
industries such as healthcare, education, agriculture and more.
YES currently work with 33 vetted IPs.
For more from YES, contact them on the following:
Phone: 087 330 0084
Email:
Youth Support: youth@yes4youth.co.za
Corporate Support: corporatesupport@yes4youth.co.za
Implementation Partner support: ip@yes4youth.co.za
Press and Media Enquiries: pressenquiries@yes4youth.co.za