Siyakha and Harambee | Creating Economically Active Youth through SYDI© (Siyakha Youth Development Initiative)

South Africa does not have a shortage of young people with ideas, energy or ambition. What we have is a significant gap between potential and economic opportunity. With so many young South Africans sitting outside the economy, we cannot rely on formal employment alone to solve the problem. We need to create additional pathways into self-employment, entrepreneurship, Gig-economy employment and sustainable income generation.

This is the strategic intent behind the Siyakha Youth Development Initiative (SYDI©) and our partnership with Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator.

The Outcomes We Want to Achieve
For us, success is not the number of young people who attended a programme. Success is what impact we achieve. We want to see young people:

• becoming economically active;
• generating their own income;
• starting and sustaining businesses;
• accessing customers and markets;
• becoming digitally enabled;
• improving their own household and community economic resilience.

The broader ambition of the Siyakha–Harambee partnership is to contribute towards one million young people becoming economically active, using partnerships with corporate South Africa, government, funders and other ecosystem partners to create the scale required to achieve this.

Launched on 16th June 2026, we have just under 3000 young people in our first cohort. Initiatives like this will not be achieved without scale and collaboration and we invite companies who are passionate about the Youth agenda to engage to see where we can support you, or where you can support our Youth Initiative to create an ecosystem of partners who will work with us to achieve scale and impact*.

For more information, please contact Liesl Solomon on liesl.solomon@siyakha.co.za
*all partners receive impact reporting, traceability and B-BBEE compliance