Our Mobile Career Cafe supports unemployed young people living in rural areas across South Africa. The Mobile Career Cafe - a trailer that we drive to villages and towns - provides work readiness skills and ongoing training and support to youth who are not studying nor working. With 74% of these young people unemployed, South Africa is facing a very serious problem - and the Mobile Career Cafe is a unique and innovative solution to address this - with potential to scale.
Bone-chilling statistics reveal that 74% of youth in South Africa are currently unemployed - and only 65% of our students are completing high school. In rural South Africa, young people are not able to access as many services as those in the cities. These young, unemployed rural youth are especially vulnerable to socio-economic exclusion - and the wider, long term impacts to South Africa's economic and social future is deeply concerning.
We developed an innovative solution: the Mobile Career Cafe. We drive to under-served areas and facilitate work-readiness workshops (CV-building, job-hunting, career development and interview skills) to unemployed youth. They're also connected to support and training. So far, evaluation statistics are extremely positive: 72% more could identify potential employment and learning opportunities; and, the number of youth who's confidence in job interview skills rose by 52% having visited our Cafe.
Once the Mobile Career Cafe has visited a rural community, a support group is established where youth can stay connected to an Action Volunteers Africa (AVA) staff mentor. Youth will be enabled to complete online courses after the event. The Cafe relies on collaborative partnerships with local NGOs in the rural areas. This allows AVA to transfer capacity to local NGOs so they can implement similar programmes in the future. The Cafe aims visit these areas at least 2 times in a 12-month period.
This project has provided additional documentation in a PDF file (projdoc.pdf).
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