Pizza Hut celebrates six months of creating impactful change to the lives of South African YES Youth. Through their partnership with YES, the multinational chain has worked towards combatting both youth unemployment and gender-bias in employment and corporate practices. Four host partners have joined YES and Pizza Hut to co-create a future that works for women, too. Together, we’re creating quality work experiences for young women through YES’s turnkey solution.
The YES turnkey solution works with 33 YES-vetted host partners across South Africa to place youth. If a corporate cannot place youth in their own organisation, they have the option to place within our host partner.
Pizza Hut is working with Youth Health Africa, YCC (Youth Content Collective), Click Learning, and Youth@Work to facilitate the placement of their youth. The main goal has been to capacitate young women into roles and opportunities that would ordinarily be prioritised for young men. This goal has been met with a successful run and has shown potential of seeing these youth into greater positions in their careers and futures.
Only 47% of women participate in the global labour force, as opposed to 72% of men.[1] Certain regions face a gap that exceeds 50%.[2] The expanded unemployment rate for women (47.2%) is 3.1% higher than the country’s total expanded unemployment rate (44.1%)
Creating opportunities that bridge the gap between men and women within the labour force has also been reported to have potential in increasing productivity within the workplace.[3]
Ewan Davenport – Managing director (MD), Pizza Hut, Middle East, Turkey and Africa: We're down here in Johannesburg celebrating six months of our YES programme. What we're doing through partnering with implementation partners is giving some really critical experience to ladies who just haven't been given the opportunities in the past. If we can inspire other big organisations to do this, we're going to be touching thousands upon thousands of young women's lives and making a real difference.
Jason Levin - Programme chair, YCC: So obviously neither Pizza Hut nor YES themselves, the Youth Employment Service, specialise in every kind of training, discipline and endeavour. So, they use people like us who are called IPs or implementation partners to run the programme on their behalf. Because some are in education, some are in tech, we're in content creation, media and marketing, and they find us an applicable specialist in all of those areas too, to run the programme on their behalf with a batch of the women from their leadership programme.
Sadie Mooi - Youth development manager, Click Learning: To be a part of such an amazing initiative where you are making a difference in thousands of lives has brought meaningful impact. I would encourage any corporate to participate and to give back to the community in our country.
Erica Kempken - Co-founder/director, Youth@worK: YES is magic because it's open. It gives us a lot of flexibility. We've got a lot of young people in many different careers, some have qualifications, others don't. It really doesn't matter. In order to make real change, we need all of us to cooperate in one programme. And collectively we can do far more than we can do separately.
Ewan Davenport: So, what we've seen from the statistics, women are not given the same opportunities that men are given. And ultimately the problem age group is 18 to 24 young black females. With this programme, what we're doing is giving them a foot in the door, work experience for a year in various different industries in order to be able to give these young ladies the leg up that they're not given in society at the moment.
The LeadHERship initiative is a prime example of simultaneously going beyond B-BBEE with YES and creating impact where it matters most, through addressing workplace gender gaps. Over 100 young, black women have been prioritised in this initiative through opportunities to kick-start their careers with critical skills and experience to aid their professional careers from the beginning.
Beyond B-BBEE focuses on creating impact on company, country, and youth through using various local and international policy tools relative to them, such as environmental, social and governance (ESG) strategies and reporting, as well as the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). YES works within these structures to create broad-based, integrated impact, all while combatting youth unemployment in the country.
A few of the LeadHERship programme participants:
Mahlako Koketso Diale: I know a lot of young, unemployed black women, who have a lot of potential in different sectors, and it's just that they're not discovered. But with this funder, it's like we are scouted and you just feel like you are picked which makes you want to give the best.
Refilwe Diale: There are women with a lot of skills that could be taught and that could be taken far and we just need to tap into that. We need to nurture all of those talents and just make sure that we get them to the right places.
Ewan Davenport’s closing words reflect his excitement about where this programme is and where it is headed. A note of gratitude towards all host partners and YES in making such changes possible and more importantly, towards the YES Youth who are doing such an incredible job in building the framework for the future for these ladies.
[1] The gender gap in employment: What's holding women back?
[1] Why does the gender gap matter?.
[2] Economic Gains from Gender Inclusion: Even Greater than You Thought