Global professional services company Accenture has invested millions of rands to equip South African youth with the skills, including coding, required to effectively compete in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

With the world converging, youth are becoming more vulnerable to unemployment, particularly if they are not equipped with the skills needed for the future of work.

“We need to have our people well equipped with ‘future skills’ and coding is one of the basic enablers allowing access to opportunities within the digital economy,” says Accenture Africa corporate citizenship and inclusion and diversity lead Khethiwe Nkuna.

“There has been huge emphasis on coding for the last year or two in South Africa, with a national proposal that coding become our thirteenth official language – sign language being the twelfth.”

To align with this, the group invested over R200-million in skills development from 2011 to 2018, with more than R38-million spent in the last financial year.

The company believes that education remains critical to enhance the prospects of youth in South Africa’s labour market, as those with little to no formal education and training account for 69% of unemployed youth.

Further, 63.4% of the total number of unemployed persons in 2019 are youth aged 15 to 34 years.

“There is a large discrepancy between what the youth are being taught and what employers expect them to know,” says Nkuna, adding that South Africa is punching below its weight, compared with its peers within the Brics bloc, namely Brazil, Russia, India and China, when it comes to technology because of its education system.

“We believe it is crucial to grow the pool of future skills available to the South African market and, ultimately, sustain our success as a high-performance business,” Nkuna continues, highlighting Accenture’s focus on teaching information and communication technology (ICT) skills and providing work in the field for youth.

The company trained 1 700 youth last year, mostly in coding and programming, and placed them in employment.

In addition, Accenture has partnered, over the past 13 years, with the University of the Witwatersrand’s Tshimologong Digital Innovation Precinct and the Joburg Centre for Software Engineering to provide both training and job opportunities.

Through the partnership, the group started a ‘Coder Dojo’ at its Harrowdene offices in Johannesburg to teach 6- to 18-year-olds how to code.

Further, with accessibility to future skills training often a challenge for youth in townships, Accenture partnered with the Quirky30 initiative.

“Founded by two former inmates as a disruptive solution and a pathway out of poverty, inequality and crime for South African youth, Quirky30 teaches coding and entrepreneurship skills to the unemployed and disadvantaged youth of Langa township and its surrounds in Cape Town,” Nkuna says.

Accenture is also part of the nongovernmental organisation, Mentec Foundation, which is focused on training in enterprise resource planning, ICT innovation and live experience.

The Mentec Foundation trains young people in townships and rural South Africa in C# and Java and has created work opportunities for more than 20 000 beneficiaries since inception.