An economy does not create opportunity through ambition alone. Behind every successful workforce lies an invisible system that determines whether talent is discovered or overlooked, whether employers find the people they need, and whether young people can take their first meaningful step into earning. When these connections function effectively, opportunity becomes accessible. When they fail, potential remains stranded, regardless of capability.
This belief sits at the heart of Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator, an organisation that has become a driving force behind South Africa’s youth employment ecosystem. Working across government, business, civil society, and technology, Harambee builds the connections that help young people discover meaningful work while enabling employers to access the talent they need. Under the leadership of CEO Kasthuri Soni, the organisation continues to strengthen this ecosystem through labour market intelligence, strategic partnerships, and the SA Youth platform, redefining how millions of young people access opportunity and transition into employment.
Building Bridges Between Talent and Opportunity
Harambee was established in 2011 by a group of visionary business leaders who sought to address a critical disconnect in South Africa’s labour market: while employers struggled to recruit and retain entry-level talent, millions of young people remained unemployed despite their willingness and ability to work.
What began as a small work-readiness programme in Johannesburg, supporting just 40 young people and five employer partners, has evolved into one of the country’s most influential youth employment initiatives. From its inception, Harambee has embraced a demand-led approach, aligning its interventions with real labour market needs rather than focusing solely on the supply of skills.
Over the years, the organisation has developed extensive labour market intelligence through data, evidence, and continuous engagement with employers and young people. These insights have shaped not only Harambee’s programmes but have also contributed to national policies and system-level solutions that strengthen pathways into employment.
Kasthuri believes that youth unemployment cannot be solved by a single institution. Sustainable change requires collaboration between government, business, civil society, funders, and young people themselves. Fifteen years later, Harambee remains committed to building partnerships that recognise potential, connect talent with opportunity, and contribute to inclusive economic growth
Understanding the Barriers Facing South Africa’s Youth
According to Kasthuri, South Africa’s youth unemployment crisis extends far beyond a shortage of jobs. With more than nine million young people outside employment, education, or training, the challenge reflects systemic barriers that prevent capable individuals from participating in the economy.
She points to practical obstacles such as transport costs, limited access to mobile data, documentation expenses, and the physical distance between communities and economic centres. Young women often face additional challenges, including caregiving responsibilities and safety concerns that further restrict their access to opportunities.
Kasthuri also highlights the persistent mismatch between education systems and labour market demands. She believes training programmes must be better aligned with industries experiencing genuine growth, ensuring young people acquire skills that employers actively seek.
At the same time, she encourages employers to rethink traditional recruitment practices that rely heavily on formal qualifications and previous experience. Recognising transferable skills developed through informal work, volunteering, caregiving, entrepreneurship, and public employment can significantly broaden access to talent while creating a more inclusive labour market.
The Power of Collective Action
Kasthuri describes youth employment as a systems challenge that requires coordinated action across multiple sectors. She emphasises that creating sustainable pathways into earning depends on government, business, civil society, and young people working toward a shared national objective.
She explains that a young person’s journey to employment is rarely linear. Individuals often require career guidance, work-readiness support, employment opportunities, and continued workplace assistance. No single organisation can provide every stage of this journey, making collaboration essential.
Kasthuri highlights the Presidential Youth Employment Intervention (PYEI), where Harambee serves as the National Pathway Manager while overseeing SA Youth, as an example of successful national coordination. She also points to partnerships within the Global Business Services sector that have supported more than 147,000 jobs since 2018, as well as the Basic Education Employment Initiative, which has created earning opportunities for over one million young people.
For Kasthuri, these initiatives demonstrate that large-scale impact is achieved not by expanding one organisation alone but by strengthening partnerships that align around a common purpose with clear accountability and shared outcomes.
Technology as a Gateway to Opportunity
Kasthuri views digital technology as a powerful enabler when designed around the realities of young work seekers. She explains that SA Youth is much more than a digital jobs board; it is a comprehensive platform created to remove barriers that often prevent young people from accessing employment opportunities.
The platform is zero-rated, allowing users to browse and apply for opportunities without incurring mobile data costs. It also offers multiple access channels, including a mobile site, telephone support, social media, and a WhatsApp chatbot, ensuring accessibility for a broad range of users.
She notes that SA Youth recognises that employment journeys are rarely straightforward. Young people often transition between education, public employment, entrepreneurship, informal work, and formal jobs. By bringing these pathways together within one trusted platform, SA Youth enables users to build profiles, access opportunities, receive support, and remain connected throughout their employment journey.
Kasthuri stresses that technology itself is not the solution. Its true value lies in strengthening the connections between employers, institutions, and young people while generating valuable labour market intelligence that informs future skills development and employment strategies
Turning Potential into Success Stories
For Kasthuri, the greatest measure of SA Youth’s success lies in the lives it has transformed. With more than 4.6 million work seekers registered and over 2.3 million earning opportunities accessed, the platform has helped countless young South Africans move closer to sustainable livelihoods.
She highlights the story of Lindokuhle Skosana, whose dream of becoming an aeronautical engineer was interrupted by financial challenges. Rather than allowing this setback to define his future, he joined SA Youth, completed online learning opportunities, and enrolled in Project Y, a coding bootcamp that helped him develop software development skills.
Today, Lindokuhle works as a software engineer at a respected national institution while mentoring other young people pursuing similar opportunities.
Kasthuri believes his journey perfectly illustrates an important reality: talent is abundant across South Africa, but opportunity is not always equally accessible. SA Youth did not create Lindokuhle’s potential; it simply enabled that potential to be recognised, developed, and connected with meaningful opportunities.
Connecting Hidden Talent with Real Opportunities
Kasthuri explains that SA Youth serves as a vital bridge between employers searching for capable entry-level talent and young people whose potential often goes unnoticed through conventional recruitment practices.
She believes that traditional hiring methods place excessive emphasis on formal qualifications, polished CVs, previous work experience, and professional networks, unintentionally overlooking many capable young individuals. A more inclusive labour market, she argues, should recognise broader indicators of capability, resilience, and potential developed through diverse life experiences.
Through the SA Youth CV, employers gain a far richer understanding of candidates than a traditional résumé can provide. Learning potential assessments and behavioural screeners reveal how young people approach workplace situations, solve problems, and demonstrate adaptability. Experiences such as running a small business, supporting a family, volunteering, participating in public employment programmes, or undertaking short-term work all provide meaningful evidence of work ethic and learning potential.
Kasthuri believes this approach enables employers to make more informed hiring decisions while expanding access to previously overlooked talent pools. At the same time, it provides young people with a fairer opportunity to showcase their abilities, ultimately narrowing the gap between untapped talent and employer demand.
Preparing Young People for Tomorrow’s Workforce
Kasthuri believes the workforce of the future will increasingly reward individuals who successfully combine technical expertise with strong human capabilities. While digital skills have become essential across industries ranging from financial services and healthcare to logistics, education, retail, and the creative economy, she emphasises that technological competence alone will not determine long-term success.
Recognising the growing demand for digital talent, Harambee invested early in developing demand-led digital skills programmes designed to address the disconnect between employer needs and the limited practical experience available to many young people. One such initiative, DigiLink, provided participants with hands-on exposure to software testing, data analytics, and real client projects, helping bridge the transition from learning to employment. These early efforts later contributed to the development of Collective_X, which now plays a significant role in advancing South Africa’s national digital skills strategy by connecting employers, training providers, funders, and emerging talent.
However, Kasthuri stresses that preparing young people for the future extends well beyond coding or technical qualifications. She believes success will increasingly depend on digital fluency, data literacy, critical thinking, communication, adaptability, problem-solving, and a lifelong commitment to learning. Equally important is providing opportunities for young people to apply these capabilities in real workplace environments, where practical experience remains one of the strongest pathways to sustainable employment.
For Kasthuri, the future of work may be driven by technology, but it will continue to be defined by human potential. Competitiveness will ultimately depend on an individual’s ability to continually learn, adapt, and remain connected to sectors experiencing meaningful growth.
Business as a Catalyst for Youth Employment
Kasthuri believes the private sector occupies a central role in South Africa’s youth employment agenda because many of the decisions that shape economic opportunity originate within businesses themselves. Hiring practices, investment choices, supplier relationships, workforce development, and industry expansion all influence whether young people can participate meaningfully in the economy.
She is of the view that companies can start making an immediate difference by providing more entry-level positions in industries that have promising employment prospects. But it is important to mention here that there are other things besides job creation that organisations should consider. This involves rethinking the entire process of recruitment through eliminating any unnecessary hurdles, discovering talent without formal qualifications or prior work experience and developing the system that helps new workers develop further.
It is also worth mentioning the fact that Kasthuri stresses on the importance of market-making activities of the private sector through procurement processes, developing supply chains, outsourcing policies and value chain development. These market-making activities can serve as good opportunities for young entrepreneurs, small firms and self-employed people.
She thinks that the sustainable way out of the problem lies in ensuring the integration of youth inclusion in the daily decision-making process of companies through hiring and training, procurement and development of certain sectors. When combined with collaboration with government, all of these things may become an engine for the expansion of sustainable earning opportunities.
A Vision for an Inclusive Economic Future
Kasthuri envisions a South Africa where youth economic inclusion is recognised as a fundamental pillar of national growth. She believes that by 2030, young people should be driving economic expansion through employment in growing industries, entrepreneurship, self-employment, and active participation across value chains that contribute to the country’s prosperity.
She sees hope in the work that is being done through better coordination between government, businesses, and civil society organizations. Programs like SA Youth, when coupled with growing labor market intelligence, increased partnering, and data-driven programming design, create the platform for fast tracking employment impacts on a large scale.
Most of all, Kasthuri finds hope in the perseverance, creativity, and dedication of South Africa’s youth. Although facing many challenges, she says they still seek out opportunities, learn new skills, become entrepreneurs, and adapt to economic changes with impressive resilience.
Her advice to young people who are looking for jobs is a message of confidence and encouragement. She thinks that everyone should understand the importance of their potential and should invest in it through learning, applying for jobs, entrepreneurship, volunteerism, networking, and building other income-generating paths.
However, Kasthuri also makes it clear that responsibility does not lie only with the young people. The leaders in business, government, and institutions need to join forces to create a system where talent is acknowledged, barriers are eliminated, potential is unlocked, and real opportunities are available for South Africa’s future generation.
“Since its inception, Harambee has been grounded in a demand-led approach, starting with the needs of the economy and employers to identify where opportunities exist.”
“What has remained constant is our discipline: to stay close to the problem, follow what the evidence tells us, and continually adapt as the economy, labour market and aspirations of young people evolve.”
“Ultimately, technology is not the solution in itself. Its value lies in enabling stronger connections between young people, employers and opportunity.”
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