EOH Work Readiness Initiative - Narrative Reports 2014 - 2015 Aug. 2014 | Página 6

WORK READINESS INITIATIVE UNDER DIGITAL JOBS FOR AFRICA

BACKGROUND

youth in developing countries, with work opportunities
in the ICT6 sector, through a new approach to Business
Process Outsourcing.

DEFINITION OF THE PROBLEM AND
THE OPPORTUNITY

In South Africa, EOH has sought to combine the
need for scarce skills in businesses with the national
government’s youth job creation drive, to help employers
and young people enter into working and learning
relationships that benefit them both. This happens under
the banner of the EOH Youth Job Creation Initiative,
which has a target of directly and indirectly supporting
the employment of 28,000 youth by 2016.

Global inequality has reached levels which threaten the
stability of current economic and social structures. The
richest 85 people on the planet have as much wealth
as the poorest half of the planet, or 3,500,000,000
people1. With so many people having little to no stake
in the economy, industrial action, crime and terrorism
have become national security priorities that consume
increasingly large portions of government budgets. The
appeal of radical ideologies to people who “have nothing
to lose but their chains,”2 has given cause to many
leaders, philanthropists, researchers and entrepreneurs
to seek a more effective way to empower marginalised
communities while still preserving individual freedoms
and rights.
The balance between service and selfishness, between
rights and responsibilities, between the gains of
the present versus the cost to the future: these are
fundamental equations in the harmony of life which
humanity is now calculating and recalculating with a
“quiet desperation”3.
Technological advances in the last 100 years have
presented undreamed of new realms of possibilities for
an improved quality of life, and an end to the drudgery
and hardship of manual labour and repetitive tasks.
Globalisation has erased prejudices, opened minds and
expanded our definition of what it means to be “human”
while also blurring ethical distinctions and cultural
diversity with an, as yet, uncertain future impact.
A narrow, short-term focus on shareholder returns is
reducing many corporate giants of innovation to riskaverse efficiency hunters, resulting in a shrinking pool
of genuinely creative new products and services, and
allowing CEOs to hide behind cost saving strategies
while showing what looks like shareholder gains4.
An ever shrinking horizon of anticipated shareholder
return is driving an equally shrinking horizon of shortterm planning in businesses, passed on to employees
in the form of greater demands for productivity and
performance and impacting their families in the form of
stress and chronic health degeneration5.

IDENTIFYING SOLUTIONS
The challenges outlined above are also being tackled by
a wide range of stakeholders across the public-private
spectrum, and across the profit-non-profit spectrum.
Few solutions however have a systemic approach which
seeks to identify solutions in a holistic context, and
address them from a wide range of angles, or across an
entire economic value-chain. Where such solutions do
exist, as for example in certain high level government
strategies, they seldom have the effectiveness to rally
the combined effort of the wide range of role-players
required to effect systemic change, especially over the
relatively short time-span of an elected government
administration.
Organisations like EOH and the Rockefeller Foundation
aim to use partnerships and networks as well as
sustainable business practices to leverage a form of
investment in their projects which have the potential to be
self-sustaining once a critical threshold is reached. The
solutions they have identifieddefined therefore have the
potential to be upscaled across entire economic sectors
and value chains and attain a level of impact which most
state-funded interventions have only dreamed of.
In South Africa, the relatively advanced nature of socially
responsible business incentivised by the state7 has the
potential to facilitate even more rapid adoption of these
solutions, making the EOH-Rockefeller Foundation
partnership particularly impactful, and providing a
relatively quick proof of practice which can help speed
up adoption in other countries that do not have similar
incentives.

In the USA, the Rockefeller Foundation has applied itself
to these challenges in order to find and support solutions
that promote resilience and inclusive growth. One of
these solutions is the Digital Jobs for Africa programme
which seeks to link high potential but disadvantaged

1 Oxf