Being Ambitious And Robust In A Midst Of The Covid-19 Storm

Afrika Tikkun is a holistic development organisation that is set to empower young people in impoverished communities, facilitating them through a variety of outreach programmes starting from early childhood development to career development. All these programmes together are encompassed in what I am sure we all know by now is called the Cradle2Career model. This model invests in four areas – mainly: education, social services, skills development, and work placement opportunities for young people.

The probability of young adults entering employment or self-employment opportunities is greater upon completing these relevant and focused programmes. To enable this, Afrika Tikkun relies on creating partnerships and working alongside other organisations to build sustainable socio-economic improvements for South African youth.

There have been challenging economic and social conditions, globally and locally, over the past couple of years, especially with the Covid-19 pandemic, however, Afrika Tikkun has somehow emerged more ambitious and robust which is a testament to the growth mindset set by our leadership.

The growth mindset can be seen through a hybrid working model that has been developed with a major focus on connecting with strong partners in different geographical areas within South Africa.

We want to expand our reach throughout South Africa and provide learning opportunities to students based in more remote or smaller cities and towns. We have historically worked through community centres based in Johannesburg and Cape Town however we are taking the Intellectual Property that we have developed over the years and we have decided to decentralise our approach and provide wider access to students.

One of the initiatives to do this is through ATOM. ATOM looks particularly at taking what we have built in the community centres and then implementing that through partners in communities where we currently don’t have a presence. I believe this will enhance the Cradle2Career methodology through a different operating model by collaborating with partners for implementation rather than implementing by ourselves.

Another avenue of growth is through the broader training programme made available and the ways of training students.

We have expanded our training offerings ensuring that we meet the needs of students as we tackle the social and economic problems seen in the country. An example of this would be the Agripreneurship programme. Realising that many people are vulnerable from both a food supply and income perspective, we are offering this innovative course to help upskill in this area. The programme is intended to improve incomes, increase access to nutritious fresh produce and create decent livelihoods. This initiative will also equip the unemployed youth with the skills to launch their own agri-businesses.

With this programme, we have focused more on developing an agriculture skills model and at the same time seeing how we can impact more rural communities because we’ve always historically worked in high-density areas.

Our training programmes have both a face-to-face component and a digital component. In most of the areas in which we operate, digital literacy is not sufficient to go fully digital. As an example, for early child development, the lesson plans will be available on a tablet, but then the training and instruction will be done face-to-face. This gives both the students and Afrika Tikkun the flexibility needed to facilitate and participate in the different training programmes.

Afrika Tikkun continues to ensure that outreach programmes are kept relevant so that when students and young adults exit the programmes, they are real-world-ready. An example would be in the case of IT subjects, where the programmes are up to date and relevant to meet appropriate skills like data mining techniques.

Afrika Tikkun has ambitious goals for the future with the intention to triple its impact from an operational perspective as well as improve collaboration models with other smaller NGOs and partners to make a developmental impact in South Africa. With the strong growth mindset within the leadership team and their ability to adapt and innovate, the future looks bright for Afrika Tikkun.