Q&A with Antony Altbeker
Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator is a large-scale employer-initiated project that seeks to overcome some of the forces of exclusion by working with partner employers to place some of the young people who are most excluded into formal sector jobs, and to increase the chances of those who are so placed of staying in employment for 12 months.
What inspired you?
I write about Harambe, which is an organization that works in South Africa that works to solve some big labor market mismatches we have where the economy has gone on a skill-intensive, capital-intensive growth path but the skill system and education system produce very few people who employers feel confident in using.
What Harambe tries to do is source people for entry level jobs into the formal sector from communities of young kids who are particularly excluded from the labor market. These are kids who come from poor households, poor educational backgrounds, households where nobody else works or very few people work, or they work precarious jobs, and it tries to improve the reliability of the recruit for the ultimate employer. It works closely with employers figuring out exactly what kind of people they need in entry-level positions, and then tries to source kids with the potential to succeed in those jobs. It goes through a whole battery of psychometric tests to do that, provides some training, job-specific, industry-specific, and then places those kids in those jobs.
To date they have place about 16-thousand kids over four years at a reasonable cost of around $2,000 a head and it’s been quite a successful story of expanding opportunities for people who probably would not have had opportunities to get into the formal sector.
What are the biggest obstacles you've faced?
Obviously there’s only so much you can get from improving the mediation of the labor market. What South Africa really needs is faster growth; it needs to create a lot more entry level jobs in the formal sector, and so there’s a big constraint on the demand side of how many jobs can be created for young kids. I think that’s the biggest issue.
Harambe is already quite a big organization, but obviously it could get bigger, and to do that we need to get more employer partners in … more places in the country because a lot of the young kids who are looking for work are too far away, frankly, from where the jobs are created. So one of the things that Harambe does is it won’t place anyone in a job that is more than one taxi ride … between the job and their homes on the principle that it’s just too costly otherwise — kids can’t afford to get to work. And so we need more partners and the economy needs to grow faster to create more of these kinds of jobs.
Why this Symposium?
South Africa’s labor market is unique. It has some unique challenges you won’t find in every labor market, in every process of exclusive growth. But what Harambe has succeeded in doing is developing a methodology of ruthless pragmatism. And I think that’s something a process like this needs to learn from. Not making the perfect the enemy of the good, and being much more practical about how to make sure employers get what they need, because ultimately the number of jobs is determined by employers, not by policy makers.
What takeaways do you have from the Symposium?
I think what the session showed is that there really is a need for this, that there are other projects elsewhere looking to do similar kinds of things to grease the wheels of the labor market, to get people into jobs. I think one of the things that Harambe knows but maybe doesn’t know well enough is how important it is to be thinking outside the top tier of potential candidates. To look beyond the people most likely to get jobs in the first place. I think that’s something all the projects need to think about quite seriously, is how do you work to democratize inclusion as much as possible? That is not just a process of expanding to the next layer, but going further beyond that to groups of people who really face severe obstacles to inclusion.