Empowering young South Africans

South Africa's youth unemployment rate is a shocking 58-75%. Higher education is unaffordable. There is an emphasis on university degrees, when short business courses fast-track young people into jobs more effectively.

The poverty level of most of SA's youth means that they have little access to electronic devices or data. We can solve the problem by securing devices and data in an ideal study and business environment.

TSIBA is ideally positioned to deliver skills training digitally. We will digitise our 5 business training courses. We will  partner with fast growing SMEs. These companies will host 100 selected learners annually to attend the online training in their offices. They will absorb successful learners into employment. 

After refining the process, we will expand the project through existing and new partnerships with companies. 

Our digital courses will move business training from classrooms to businesses needing new staff, changing the trajectory of unemployable youngsters. 

Government policy (1948-1994) entrenched systemic rifts in SA with regards to job opportunities. Black people were denied quality education at all levels. Our youth unemployment rate is currently between 58% and 75%!

 A high Gini coefficient is symptomatic of our surplus of unskilled workers and shortage of skilled labour. Unemployed people accept work at any wage; skilled labour comes at a cost. 

Supply chains have excluded black-owned businesses and the SA government has intervened to incentivise companies to choose black-owned suppliers and contractors. Companies choosing black suppliers earn points qualifying them for government contracts. This intervention compels companies to select black suppliers which may be underskilled and may charge more, making the supply chain inefficient and costly. There is a need to upskill black business people so that companies would freely choose them as suppliers without being coerced.

Digitising TIA’s training courses will enable both unemployed workers and underskilled business people to study online and increase their chances of employment and effectiveness. There will be no geographical limit to whom we can train. We can upskill thousands of potential and existing black business people, qualifying them for employment, improved management skills and competitive advantage in supply chains. 

TSIBA will digitise our skills training courses and expand our reach beyond the confines of our classroom space. 

The 5 accredited vocational courses are:

• Generic Management
• Business Analysis
• Project Management
• Retail Marketing 
• Business Process Outsourcing

Online lectures will involve live sessions with lecturers and staff moderating peer discussions.

This pilot will train 100 young people online annually over 2 years. From 2024, we will be equipped to train an exponentially increasing number of future potential workers through our online platform. 

TSIBA partners with private sector compan, adapting our training courses to their human resource needs. Companies employ our learners who have completed their bespoke courses, benefitting from skilled workers, and the "graduates" have a high probability of further employment.

Two companies will collaborate with us in this pilot project. Both companies exhibit potential for high volume recruitment, absorbing our trainees into employment after their internship year. 

Following the success of our digitised training, other companies needing to scale up will find it worthwhile investing in the training fees of new potential employees. Our courses will solve their need for employable workers and create opportunities for potentially thousands of unemployable young people to become active agents in our economy.

A recent newspaper article described our target population as "Young, gifted, black & still left behind". 

We serve black South Africans aged 18-32 who attended sub-standard primary and secondary schools and who come from highly resource-constrained communities. One in four has a job. Most have unemployed parents and come from single mother families. Older generations are undereducated and unable to expose their children to the inside of an office, or teach them the life skills needed for successful employment. 

Anger and bitterness over the Apartheid heritage remain, and there is a lack of focus, discipline and hope for the future. Endemic government corruption, gangsterism, drugs and few recreational and sporting facilities contribute to the general apathy. Although many of them have access to a cell phone, data in South Africa is expensive, limiting their ability to study online. 

TSIBA Business School was founded in 2004 and we have spent 17 years getting to know our market. With deliberate encouragement and focus on leadership and self development we see our students transform into bright, enthusiastic and optimistic young leaders. 

We know that the magnitude of the crisis of youth unemployment in South Africa is a time bomb. Our formal Business School at our Cape Town campus can accommodate only 1000 students at a time. We urgently need to scale up our training courses and reach a larger audience. 

Our active partnerships with successful and growing South African businesses make us unique, and are key to our solution: our partners have office space, wifi and devices on which learners can study. These businesses are co-funders and co-enablers of our learners.

It costs USD 1 700 to train an unemployed person (earmarked for employment by one of our partner companies) through a 12 month training course, when the training takes place in a classroom. We estimate that the cost of training would be reduced to USD 1 200 if done online, with the same standard of committed and involved trainers. The huge advantage of the digitised training is that it will take place in the office environment, exposing our young people to the culture of the workplace, connecting them to a network of potential employers and allowing them to interact with hard working, employed people, people who they are not accustomed to engaging with.

A year of online training in a working environment, followed by internships at the host company for successful graduates of the courses, is our solution to get thousands of unemployed young people absorbed into South Africa's economy as active, engaged citizens.

 This environment not only makes training much more affordable but multiplies exponentially the learning space that has been limited to our physical classroom walls. Digitised courses hosted by our partner businesses has vast potential to bring in all those young, gifted, black people who are so willing to work, but who have been left out and left behind. 

Digital Inclusion: how can everyone have access to the digital economy?

With a Gini coefficient of 0.65, South Africa's poor have little access to wifi, data or electronic devices. We are moving into the fourth industrial age and they are being left behind.

This solution brings young unemployed and underskilled people into businesses, giving them access to online business courses . Digitising our training in bespoke courses will motivate our growing partner companies to gather in potentially thousands of excluded youth, equipping and empowering them to thrive as productive economic citizens who can confidently contribute to the digital economy.

TSIBA Ignition Academy (TIA) was established as an arm of TSIBA Business School in 2018, when we realised that a 3-4 year university degree would not accelerate our impact as fast as short, relevant business training courses developed to suit specific companies in their training programmes.

TIA has served South African businesses in Cape Town and Johannesburg for three years, using our classrooms to train their staff and practically prepare young people for employment. The Covid19 pandemic compelled us to take our courses online, and like countless colleges and schools across the world, we realised how effective these were and how we could scale our influence and reach.

I selected the "growth" stage of development because our sevice is established, and by digitising our core courses, we could grow our impact significantly and even exponentially. 

Like many other educational institutions across the world, the Covid19 lockdowns helped us realise that digitising our training would be a catalyst to multiplying our programmes - taking our business courses from our limited physical classroom space into the offices and conference rooms of all our corporate clients, and allowing us to train youngsters across the nation without having to bring them to our venues in Cape Town and Johannesburg!

 The huge benefit of this solution is that it will bring young people who do not have data, wifi or electronic devices into the fourth industrial age. They will get access to the resources of our well established corporate partners. 

We currently have 400 students at our Business School. We plan to increase this to 500 in 2022, and to 1000 in five years' time. 

Our Ignition Academy, which provides short training courses, has no students currently owing to South Africa's lockdown restrictions. With the digitisation of our courses, we plan to be training at least 100 learners next year in our two partner companies, and we aim to scale this up to several thousand within five years. 

Our progress is measured with a focus on our student:

1. How many students we have enrolled
2. The pass rate as well as grades if grades are used in evaluations
3. The throughput rate ie what percentage of students complete their degree or course
4. The employment rate of our graduates, and how many months it takes them to find employment, given that South Africa's unemployment rate is high - officially at 32%
5. How many students progress to further studies

With this new solution, progress will be measured in a similar fashion:

1. Number of learners enrolled in digitised learning at our partner companies
2. The percentage of learners completing their courses
3. The absorption rate of course graduates into employment by our partner companies

as well as:

1. Number and size of corporate clients partnering with us to use our digital courses for their inhouse training, and training of unemployed but potential future employees.

All full-time TSIBA Ignition Academy staff are working on our digitisation solution team: five people in total.

Faculty members of TSIBA Business School assist on an advisory basis, especially Mr. John Durr, head of major Entrepreneurship. 

We will use the services of Synrgise to develop our learner management system.

TIA's CEO Karien Cloete holds an Advanced Diploma in Labour Law and a Bachelor Degree in Law. She has a wealth of experience in the Telecoms, Media, NGO and Recruitment sectors.

John Durr of TSIBA Business School will assist in course content. As head of the Entrepreneurship Major, he is an innovation specialist with a strong entrepreneurial background, having started several newcos. John was in the corporate world for 20 years at senior and executive levels and then consulted in strategic project execution before joining TSIBA.

Our 17 years of working with 18-32 year olds from resource-constrained communities has prepared our team to serve and equip the kind of learners that our partner companies will be admitting for training in their offices. Indeed, some of our team members are graduates of TSIBA Business School and themselves come from the same environments as our students and learners. They know well the kinds of challenges that our students face, particularly their lack of access to an older generation with tertiary education and meaningful work, and their limited access to smart phones, computers and data or wifi. They too were accustomed to going hungry, scraping money together for transport to  and from college, and grappling with crippling lack of self-confidence when entering the corporate world. 

TSIBA exists to serve the majority of South Africans who were excluded from meaningful work and education by the Apartheid system of 1948-1994. Inclusion, equity and diversity are what we live and strive for. 

Our CEO Dr. Rudi Kimmie is South African "Indian" or "Coloured" and our Dean Dr. Peter Ayuk is "black African", from Cameroon. Our faculty comprises staff who are of all race groups in South Africa - "white, Coloured, Black and Indian" if one needs to classify them. 

We would love input, mentoring and advice from your professors, partners or contacts whom you believe could help us advance our solution and make it a reality. 

We are actively seeking funding to digitise our courses; perhaps you would know funders who would be excited by this project?

Our team is specifically endeavouring to bring the millions of unemployed and underskilled youth in South Africa into the business and working world so that they can benefit from our digital business training, learn and grow through being in a corporate and office environment, receive input from mentors and become confident in the use of technology. 

We would use the prize money to finance the digitisation of our five core modules.