Part 1: How We Impacted 500+ NEET Youth Across Six Provinces in Six Weeks
Part 1: Finding the Youth and Cracking the Attrition Rate
Over six weeks, my team and I, contracted by GFA, travelled across South Africa delivering the GIZ Digital Skills for Jobs and Income II (DS4JI II) Self-Employment Programme. Our target was to reach more than 500 NEET youth across six provinces, including more than 100 young people with TVET qualifications.
NEET stands for young people who are Not in Employment, Education or Training, but there was an important difference with the group we were looking for. These were young people who already had an IT background, qualification or some level of digital skills. We weren't teaching people how to use a computer for the first time. Many had studied IT at a TVET college, university or private institution, completed shorter training programmes, or developed skills independently in areas such as software development, web development, IT support, cybersecurity, digital marketing, content creation and data.
The question we were trying to answer was what happens after the training. What happens when someone has spent several years developing an IT skill or even completed a qualification, but is still unemployed and has never been able to turn that skill into income?
Working With SA Youth at Scale
One of the first challenges was simply finding enough young people who met those requirements across multiple provinces within a very short period of time. Working with SA Youth gave us the ability to recruit at a scale we would not have been able to achieve through our own networks alone. Across the programme, we received 7,882 applications and recruited more than 1,300 young people into the pipeline.
At first glance, those numbers make a target of 500 participants look relatively easy. What we quickly learned was that the number of applications means very little if you don't understand the attrition that happens between someone applying, confirming their attendance and physically walking into the venue.
This became one of the biggest operational lessons from the entire programme.
By the time we understood the pattern, our approach was to aim for approximately 200 suitable applicants for a workshop where we ultimately wanted around 60 people in the room. From those 200 applicants, we might get around 120 people to confirm their attendance. Even after confirming, we learned to expect only around 50% to actually arrive on the day. If only 60 confirm, we'd expect only 30 to attend. That is a ratio of 10 : 6 : 3.
So, for every 10 applications, roughly 6 people confirmed and.