The Youth Employment Service (YES) launched this week significantly shifts the weighting of black empowerment from a narrow focus on ownership to a broad focus on employment. Companies that spend 1.5% or more of net profit after tax on employing young interns can go up a BEE level and substantially improve their black empowerment rating, which is an increasingly important measure for doing business in South Africa. YES has been incubated by Investec but is aimed at the 250 blue-chip company leaders who form the CEO Initiative. To go up a BEE notch, Investec would, for example, have to hire 1250 interns and FirstRand would have to take on 5500 young people. Over three years, YES aims to place a million interns, calculating that 60% of them will enter the labour market in this way. Such an outcome would make a sizeable dent in youth unemployment. Tashmia Ismail-Saville of YES acknowledges that this won't change the structural impediments to unemployment but it will make a significant ...
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