Investing in skills and enterprise development is crucial to transformation and unemployment, writes Pierre Bruwer, MD of Netstar, a subsidiary of Altron. But for such investment to be sustainable, it must make financial sense. Fortunately, some innovative South African companies are achieving that.
South Africa is in the unenviable position of facing several national crises at the same time. Fortunately, we are an innovative nation, and solutions are emerging that not only address our significant challenges, but solve several of them at the same time.
Among these challenges, three are most pressing. Unemployment is stratospheric; start-ups and SMEs lack skills, capital, and experience; and established organisations face a squeeze between skills development and delivering profits for shareholders.
Despite this complex set of problems, South Africans always surprise me with their creativity in working to solve them. Enterprise development (ED) initiatives are constantly emerging, skills development remains a priority, and almost every organisation is finding ways to transform its staff, management, and suppliers.
These solutions are encouraging, but to be sustainable, they must also drive the bottom line.
However, it is possible to transform, to provide youth skills and opportunities and to grow small business while generating positive, profitable outcomes for all involved.
An organisation that is doing this is Sum of 21, a creative incubator that develops young talent so that they can successfully enter the creative industry as juniors in their respective fields.
Sum of 21 offers a 12-month internship/learnership programme to young creatives and communicators. They work on real marketing briefs or client projects under the mentorship, guidance and coaching of dedicated senior staff members.
Sum of 21 provides skills development and on-the-job training, while driving transformation and empowerment through commercial partnerships with corporates and clients. It’s an innovative solution to job creation.
While the partnership certainly forms part of Netstar’s enterprise and supplier-development initiatives, and our B-BBEE investment, the most impressive part of the relationship is that Sum of 21 operates perfectly independently as a marketing supplier.
We have had some highly effective collaborations, working together on our recent repositioning strategy, various brand projects, internal messaging, as well as our regular social-media communications.
The company provides a competitive service at market rates, and because of its flexible structure, with new graduates coming in, and others moving on to rewarding jobs elsewhere in the sector, it is also extremely agile.
The nature of the business as a skills-development hub also means that partners can pay for their marketing services from the ED and skills-development allocation in their B-BBEE budgets. This is a compelling solution that combines development spend with affordable, highly effective delivery.
Sum of 21 is but one of several similar glimmers of hope in the business sector. For us as responsible corporate citizens, partnering with such organisations is a great opportunity to create jobs, develop SMEs, and help grow our economy.
If we are to achieve our nation-building goals, we need to continue developing concepts that are viable, profitable, and which deliver on the needs of all stakeholders. As with so much else in life, when everybody benefits, we succeed together.
ENDS