50% of children entering the schooling system do not complete. Two in every three youth are unemployed. YearBeyond provides a year-long bridging programme to unemployed youth, offering work experience, personal/professional development, mentorship, and economic connections. At the same time, youth help struggling children at risk of dropping out of school with reading, numeracy and wellbeing.
Launched in 2014, YearBeyond is a social franchise partnership programme. As a dual beneficiary programme, we provide NGO partners with catch-up materials for children & parents, and the youth development training, using a train-the-trainer model. A mentor oversees programme delivery.
Learners get 150 hours of extra support and parents access workshops and materials. Youth get 96 hours of curriculum content to build key competencies.
To enable scale, the programme has honed its systems and also leverages technology to track attendance, roll out the curriculum, and monitor quality. As a result, the programmeโs live data dashboard shows which youth are in service/work, how many learners are in sessions and the length of sessions enabling the management team to zoom into and support areas with challenges.
Youth are effective in supporting learners because they are supported by mentors. In 2023/4 we are piloting a virtual mentorship model which will enable scale into remote areas.
Despite Covid challenges, YearBeyond has grown significantly, providing opportunities to over 500 youth supporting 7000 children in 2020 to 3,500 youth supporting 33 130 learners across two provinces in 2023.
The focus in the last two years has been on building systems for scale while retaining programme quality.
We have grown from a small family of 13 partners to over 30 partners, from a largely paper-based, face to face programme to a digital, blended programme leveraging technology for scale and developing manuals and a comprehensive quality assurance system.
On exit, 78% of youth become economically active. Feedback from teachers suggests an overwhelming positive impact on learner attendance, wellbeing, confidence, self-esteem, and literacy/numeracy.
There are three innovations available.
Firstly, our youth development model, transitioning youth from unemployment to being economically active. Secondly, our reading & literacy catch-up programme for children. Thirdly, our social franchise model for scale including the systems, guides and onboarding processes.
Interested parties can visit us or email yearbeyond@westerncape.gov.za
