SA Affordable Housing September - October 2019 // ISSUE: 78 | Page 5

NEWS
No glass ceilings -
lots of dry walls
F
ounded in 2003, the Saint-Gobain YouthBuild Academy
has been supported by YouthBuild, an international
NGO, since 2016.
The academy is the only CETA (Construction Education
Training Authority) accredited training provider in South
Africa that presents the National Certificate: Ceiling &
Partition Installation NQF 3. The collaboration between
Saint-Gobain and YouthBuild prepares young people to meet
construction workforce needs and to improve communities
through the Community Asset Building (CAB) projects.
Earlier this year, the French Minister of Foreign and
European Affairs, Jean-Yves Le Drian, paid a whistle-stop visit
to Saint-Gobain South Africa’s premises in Germiston, Gauteng,
to see how the building materials producer is developing skills
through its Saint-Gobain YouthBuild Academy.
The academy’s objective is to bridge the artisan skills
gaps and create a pathway into the labour market for
disadvantaged youth. In the 16 years since its inception, the
academy has graduated more than 1 000 students (including
30 deaf students), with about 75% of the 2018 graduates
being placed into livelihood opportunities.
Through their complementary expertise, the objective
of Saint-Gobain and YouthBuild is to up-skill and educate
unemployed youth on the theory, practice, and installation
of environmentally compliant systems for new and
renovated buildings. Students practise their skills by
repairing and fixing local crèches, schools, and community
halls in need. Saint-Gobain provides the ‘hard’ skills and
YouthBuild the ‘soft’ skills on behavioural change, leadership
and job readiness, which together address the social deficit
that many underprivileged children face after an upbringing
of poverty.
Once the academy has selected the students, they are
required to achieve competency in 132 credits clustered
into four subjects. These include drywall and ceiling
installation (safety, tools, and assembly of components);
written and oral communication skills; applied mathematics
(calculating quantities and costings); and workplace skills
like understanding HIV/Aids, first-aid basics, and business
plans. The programme runs for 12 months and has capacity
to train 100 young people a year.
LOTS OF SOFT SKILLS AND MENTORING
What makes the programme so successful, is that it includes
not just technical construction skills but the soft skills
necessary to run a business: marketing; communication;
quoting; getting paid; and quality control – which are the
particular expertise of YouthBuild. It is a mental toughness
programme to prepare graduates to establish their own
businesses, where previously they might not have had
the social acumen. In addition, students are trained (and
expected) to pass on their skills to other unemployed
individuals when they are employed on a site. The success
of the academy stems from this characteristic: that its
graduates are used on a construction site to not only perform
their function, but in training local workers, with the latter
thereafter counting towards the 30% of the value of a
www.saaffordablehousing.co.za
SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2019
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