Strategic partnerships have the power to tackle South Africa’s most pressing employment challenges. By diversifying networks, organisations can accelerate diversity in the workforce — especially for young women and people with disabilities, two groups most affected by unemployment. Drawing from CAPACITI’s proven impact, Kelly Maroon the Head Talent challenges organisations to set bold, audacious goals and take deliberate action to create lasting change. In this thought leadership, expect a mix of hard truths, inspiring vision, and practical insights on how partnerships can reshape the future of work in South Africa.

If you look deeper into the country’s youth unemployment statistics you’ll see something frightening about the rate of unemployment amongst young women and even more so, within the people with disabilities community. I believe that if we want to make real progress against unemployment, our goals must be worthy of relentless effort and driven by ambitions that are daring and transformative.

CAPACITI is committed to tackling unemployment, as demonstrated by our impressive outcomes. More than 60% of the young people we’ve supported in starting technology-driven careers are women, and over 5% are from the disability community. We believe we are on track to exceed 10% this year, further strengthening our commitment to inclusion. These results remind us that when ambition meets intentional action, the outcomes can challenge perceptions and redefine what’s possible.

Over the last five years, CAPACITI has contributed to facilitating over 6737 job opportunities for the youth of South Africa, with over 4530 of these youth equipped with skills needed to access the technology sector in technology-enabled, or -supported, careers.  Collectively, CAPACITI graduates have earned more than R465 million in salaries — money that has flowed back into households, supported economic mobility, and strengthened social and financial security. These outcomes illustrate what’s possible when talent development is intentionally designed to connect skills training with real career pathways.

Partnerships Fuel Opportunity

It’s important to recognize that we’ve been able to unlock impact and success due to the trust, encouragement and funding from all our partners over the years. Partnerships are essential to our organisation and serve as the driving force behind our capacity to create meaningful impact. The two concepts operate in tandem for us: partnerships are what unlock our impact.

Partnerships means a lot more to CAPACITI than collaboration – we believe that the intersection between intention and action creates an environment where goals, outcomes and real impact can be made.

Intentionally Redesigning Early Talent Strategies

Generic early hiring strategies often have good intentions but fall short on delivery, leading to a low return on investment. This isn’t just about financial loss; it’s about the wasted time and potential.

At CAPACITI, we aren’t ticking our way through a checkbox that gets repeated for every initiative we launch. Our corporate partners, those who have come back for programme after programme, have given us the space to not only meet their early talent workforce needs, but influence its direction too.

With a deep understanding of what the hallmarks are for early talent success in the workplace as we currently know it, we advise, and we recommend:

• Early talent workforce planning can mean long term business expansion.
• Investing in initiatives for young women increases workplace diversity and fresh minds, which in turn provides greater perspectives and better go-to-market products.
• Supporting local career-shifting accelerators means accessing talent that not only deserve a seat at the table but are likely to redesign its efficacy entirely.
• Tapping into a talent pool where diversity goes beyond gender and race, opens businesses up to new market consideration.

Excellence from the starting line

With a well-considered talent acquisition process, CAPACITI leverages on the dynamic expertise of our partner ecosystem. From integrated psychometric assessments facilitated by Evalex, to one-on-one screenings supported by the South African Graduate Employers Association, we partner for success from the get-go. With a throughput rate on our programmes averaging at well over 90%, we have become well versed on knowing what to look for because we understand what the workforce needs of our partners.

Designing for Diversity

With our two large Accelerators in Cape Town and Johannesburg, and our growing Hubs in Gqeberha and Hazyview, we’re more geared up for diversity than ever before. A concerted effort has been made at considering location, space and accessibility but our commitment goes beyond that. We’ve had to ask ourselves really important questions:

• How does our approach to people development support everyone?
• What kinds of “normative” approaches should we leave behind to embrace truly accessible talent development strategies?
• How do we support the complexities that arrive and manifest with truly different, dynamic and diverse groups of young talent?
• What assumptions are we making about what we think people need?

Answering these questions has not been easy, but we’ve had help along the way. From supportive sessions hosted by Lyra Health and a long, exhaustive list of team workshops later, we don’t have all the answers. What we do have instead is the desire to be open to learning, tapping into consultants and workplace specialists and listening to the needs of our early talent at every juncture.

That led us to a methodology that sees talent development across four critical pillars:

• Technology skills, technological tools and assistive tech
• Psychosocial wellbeing at the individual level with a focus on self-mastery
• Employability awareness and increased career readiness
• Integration of the self into thriving industries and career opportunities

This year we completed the delivery of a programme targeting 100 previously unemployed women, in partnership with Salesforce. With a certification rate of over 90% and over 84% of the young women unlocking positive career destinations, we built this programme with a deeply specific lens.

As we repeatedly navigated and reconsidered the programme design and delivery, our efforts were supported by many ecosystem members along the way. One standout contributor to our success was through collaboration and creation with Salesforce Senior Workforce Programme Manager, Alexandra Klein.

Community Innovation and Support

While our funders and partners recognise us as the experts in early talent, we recognise the value that community contributes to our success. We see community both laterally and concentrically; multiplying our effects into communities that our talent come from by supporting their local ambitions and economy as well as bringing in community members who need access to our expertise to grow.

Beyond this, we are part of a community of intentional disruptors who want to see more generations in the workforce more than ever before. We are innovative nurturers who believe that those who are so radically different to our normative lenses have something unique to add to the economy. Here we have the backing and support of ecosystem drivers like Youth Development Collaboration Lab, Youth Capital and the National Youth Development Agency.

Our partnerships don’t end there. As tides within the talent acquisition space shift, we have identified a continued need to embrace partnerships with SMME and start-ups – this ensures that we’re placing CAPACITI talent in a broad spectrum of business sizes across diverse sectors. With placement partners such as Hapo Technologies and Big Beard Web Solutions.

“Successful partnerships for accelerated diversity are built on shared accountability, practical skills development, and intentional pathways to employment including mentorship and growth. When partners commit to measurable outcomes and sustain collaboration beyond short-term projects, diversity becomes a living, breathing part of the team, transforming both organisations and lives for the better.”

Thembelihle Kondile, Director, RecruitAGraduate

There’s so much more for us to explore – stay connected for a deeper look into how we are redefining development strategies for greater diversity success!

Keen to see how we can help your business access talent, workforce planning or better utilize your skills spend? Get in touch today!