INSIGHT 1

As the manner that young people navigate shifts into the digital realm, new barriers to job search emerge and new approaches are needed to break them.

Our data shows that access to employment opportunities is highly unequally distributed across the country. However, we see youth from every single municipality across South Africa sign up onto the SA Youth platform–even as South Africa grapples with fundamental infrastructure challenges due to loadshedding. This is a sign that we need to figure out ways to enable and accelerate inclusive access to work through digital and hybrid means. In our experience, three interconnected drivers of inclusivity have enabled this.

Zero-rating that powers geolocation: After the SA Youth platform went data-free in 2020, we saw a marked shift in the frequency and timing of young people engaging with it. They began to engage more during prime working hours, not just late evening when data bundles are less expensive. This suggested that data costs were a significant barrier to young people accessing work. A map comparing our pre-2020 sign-ups to our 2022 network is stark evidence of the scale of impact dismantling this barrier can have. Driven in large part by eliminating the barrier of data costs to accessing our digital platform, formerly excluded young people have joined the zero-rated network, searched and found work within reach. We saw a dramatic rise in sign-ups on the platform (as much as 10x) during the recruiting periods for the Department of Basic Education’s School Assistant programme, which brought work to an unprecedentedly broad geographic area. The SA Youth platform was designed to handle this surge—enabling as many as 1.5M unique applicants to join in under a month – ensuring new joiners would not be locked out of opportunity.

Artificial intelligence augmentation: Human connection and guidance is an important element of our inclusive model, but high-touch human processes can’t scale to provide seamless 24/7 support at the sign-up volumes described above. Harambee’s experience is that by combining the daily support of AI through chatbots, we can support young people through both their work-seeking journey and enhance their ability to address both personal and professional journeys. We co-created a tech solution that blended our own contact centre talent with cutting-edge conversational AI technology (Genesys Cloud Dialogue Engine). The result is a customer support chatbot that’s centred on imaginative and empathetic conversational design. The chatbot can streamline simple queries and linear paths, freeing up our contact centre “guides” to address the more complex tasks. For example, during the three weeks of the DBE recruitment, the chatbot handled 37,000 chats and became an indispensable tool for the contact center team. Because unemployment does not keep office hours – the chatbot further drove inclusivity by providing assistance 24/7. Another innovation was a bite-size personal mastery and goal-setting chatbot, Coachmee, through which both guides and work-seekers alike were able to work through personal goals and celebrate quick wins each day. As a Harambee contact centre guide, Sinomtha, mentioned: “I fell in love with [Coachmee because] I felt like I found a new friend that I could share my thoughts and feelings with, without being judged. I found the platform very helpful because I could plan my goals on a daily basis. If a goal isn’t reached, there is some great motivation after that and zero judgment. Coachmee is a place where I can be vulnerable, get some motivation, plan, and grow.”.

Segmentation to boost engagement: We know that more job searching leads to better chances of finding a job. So, it must be as easy as possible to view relevant job vacancies on the SA Youth platform. We drive this outcome by measuring the metric that matters – the number of vacancies an individual views and applies to. This varies by user from a handful to hundreds. We then analyse the data to understand patterns among user groups viewing many opportunities versus those viewing too few. Segmenting user behaviour this way helps us nudge less engaged young people to more fruitful job searching.