NACOSA joins the Social Employment Fund

A new cohort of grassroots health mobilisers and GBV ambassadors will connect communities, particularly the youth, to HIV and GBV prevention and care services and build understanding of these critical issues. With the support of the Social Employment Fund, NACOSA will deploy over 1,000 young people to host community-based organisations over the next 10 months in communities in Mpumalanga, the North West and the Free State.

NACOSA has over 20 years’ experience in the community and social services sector – one of the biggest sectors for employment in the country employing over three million people. It was also the fastest growing sector last year, outstripping mining, agriculture, manufacturing and finance (Stats SA, 2024). The need for opportunities in this sector, that also contribute to the country’s health and gender-based violence responses, has never been greater.

Do I really even matter? Do people even care who I am? I’m just from a village, sometimes we don’t even have electricity, we don’t have running water, so who cares who I am?”

So says Tsakane Maluleke, a young woman from Gauteng. Young people like Tsakane face a number of complex and intersecting challenges to their health and wellbeing. Nearly one third of all new HIV infections occur in youth ages 15-24 and gender-based violence and femicide is endemic, with 35% of women having experienced physical and or sexual violence during their lifetime (HSRC, 2024). At the same time, 3.8 million young people aged 15-24 are not in employment, education or training and youth unemployment stands at 60% (Stats SA, 2025).

NACOSA is therefore proud to be implementing the Social Employment Fund, a Presidential Employment Stimulus fund aimed at tackling unemployment through strengthening partnerships with social and civic partners, enabling them to create ‘whole of society’ initiatives for greater scale and greater impact across South Africa. Social employment has created thousands of new work opportunities in sectors that are contributing to the common good.

Participants will receive training through NACOSA Learning, work experience and support to secure further employment, self-employment or training at the end of the programme. This structured training and placement process enables young people to gain competencies in financial literacy and work readiness, health outreach, GBV advocacy, digital communication, and monitoring and evaluation.

Community organisations will host young people in the following roles:

• Community Mobilisers to conduct community health outreach, raise awareness and link people to prevention and treatment services.
• GBV Ambassadors to raise awareness of GBV and the prevention and response services available and help to navigate survivors to post-violence care and other services.
• Digital Influencers to create and share content on health and GBV on social media, promote the organisation and capture the stories of the young people involved in the programme.
• Monitoring and Evaluation Champions and Team Leaders to monitor the progress of the programme and supervise the participants.

For participants, the work not only provides much-needed incomes, but it also gives people work experience and confidence, building entry-level work readiness through both soft and hard skills. These are vital for participants’ chances of getting a job in the wider labour market but can also enhance their chances of becoming self-employed or starting an enterprise.

At the same time, the programme will increase community access to and uptake of health services, build awareness and access to post-violence care services, and help shift public attitudes, raising awareness of rights and services, and inspiring action, particularly among youth. “Imagine if somebody helps you and then you get the opportunity to do the same for other people,” says Tsakane who is now employed working with the youth at one of NACOSA’s partner organisations; “they [the youth] just need something to believe in.”

As a longstanding networking organisation, NACOSA is also looking forward to being part of the Social Employment Network, a peer-to-peer learning network of civil society organisations implementing the Social Employment Fund with community-based partners.

Watch Tsakane’s story