Umsizi Fellow, Spencer Horne of South Africa, honored by Fast Company

Autonomous airship logistics company, Cloudline, took top honours at the inaugural Fast Company SA Most Innovative Companies Awards held in Cape Town. The event was held to acknowledge and celebrate South African ingenuity and complements the on-street edition of the magazine in which all 25 top nominees will be featured.

Cloudline was launched in 2017 and has gone on to grab world attention for its innovative approach to delivering essentials to people without access to all-weather roads (or any roads at all).

Strengthening Impact through Public Private Partnerships - TVET Toolkit

To provide members of the Peer Learning Network (PLN) with practical steps and resources to plan, develop and maintain effective public-private partnerships (PPPs). 

The focus of these partnerships is to help provide more youth with employability skills that increase income generation and dignity. 

STRENGTHENING IMPACT THROUGH PUBLIC PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS PEER LEARNING NETWORK 2020

In this toolkit, we explore building PPPs through the lens of TVET partnerships. Although the examples provided within are specific to that type of partnership, we believe the strategies can be leveraged for all PPPs.

Supporting Youth Employment Ecosystem Coordination for Impact

Africa’s youth unemployment challenge sits at the crossroads of colliding forces—the youth bulge, job disruption from the fourth industrial revolution, skilling systems that are increasingly disconnected from the reality of youth and market needs, and a changing macroeconomic environment. Organizations addressing youth unemployment are often constrained in their ability to achieve impact at scale unless they are able to work across ecosystems with multiple participants including governments, the private sector, and educational institutions, to produce coordinated responses to this very complex challenge.

Case Study: Nudged in Nigeria

Insights from behavioural economics, which combines findings from psychology and economics, suggest that a deeper understanding of decision-making and behaviour could improve human services program design and outcomes. Principles from behavioural economics are applied to make small changes in the environment to facilitate desired behaviours. These small changes have come to be known as “nudges” which Thaler & Sunstein define as any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behaviour in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives...Putting fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.

WAVE (West African Vocational Education)

Umsizi Fund has supported WAVE to test moonshot goals like figuring out how to assess soft skills and match jobseekers based on compatibility. We invested in capacity building for the WAVE team and helped them recruit new partners and supporters.

“Umsizi Fund has been a true partner in every sense of the word, fully aligning with our mission to level the playing field for every young African to access the skills and the economic opportunity to become what they imagine. They have provided patient and flexible capital, always based on the question of "where can our funding be most helpful for you right now?" and recognizing that those at the frontline should get to decide where/how capital is deployed. Our impact to date would not be possible without the trust-based impact-focused long-term partnership we have developed with the Umsizi Fund.”

-- Misan Rewane, Founder and CEO, WAVE, Nigeria