Job Creation With Impact

Uconomy provides business management and development support, access to opportunities and funding, labour at subsidised rates and advisory services to leverage the potential of SMMEs to create jobs.

- Glenneis Kriel

To do something about South Africa’s huge youth unemployment problem, Scha van Niekerk and Ben Naude, directors at Uconomy, in 2015 decided to employ jobless school-leavers in their auditing firm’s back office.

“We decided to target unskilled labour, reasoning that people with no experience were more eager and desperate to learn than graduates,” Van Niekerk says.

Other major companies, of which Investec was the first, soon saw the success of the initiative and asked Uconomy to also source, train and employ jobless young people for them.

Since then, the number of people going through Uconomy’s employment programme grew from its initial four to more than 4 500 people, while the types of jobs on offer expanded from basic clerical and customer services to include more than 120 other fields.

The key to job creation

Van Niekerk soon realised that more was needed to achieve meaningful job creation. “The futurologist, Clem Sunter, says that to create decent jobs, you need decent businesses. So instead of trying to create millions of jobs, the aim should rather be to create a million decent businesses that are able to grow the job market.”

He adds that big corporates are expected to be the main job creators in the country. However, when times get tough, they are also the first to downsize.