Spazapp, developed by a Durban technology team, has joined forces with the likes of big corporates Microsoft, Hollard, Barloworld, and Coca-Cola in signing the Tshepo 1 Million pledge led by Gauteng Premier David Makhura.
The Tshepo 1 Million project is an expansion of the Tshepo 500 000 initiative, launched in 2014, which now aims to provide 1-million unemployed youth opportunities through skills training, job placement and entrepreneurship by 2019.
Spazapp, a freely downloaded Android app aimed at spaza store owners, aims to bridge the divide between the formal and informal markets by providing informal traders access to bulk buying benefits via an easy to use mobile ordering app.
Beyond the technology, the sustainable social enterprise amplifies its impact by running Spazasparks, an upliftment division that train youth on using the app for mobile trading and rendering support to other spaza store owners.
“Being first to market with this type of app, we’ve built our success on working from the ground up,” says Tim Strang, Spazapp CEO. “Through partnerships with government and employment accelerators like Harambee, we will be supporting 5 000 youths to become self-employed from the moment they complete their Spazapp development course.
“We aren’t an outside force that come in and try to change things. We support the Sparks, who in turn then support business owners and members in their community, earning a percentage of all sales,” Strang adds. “Spazasparks is an opportunity that offers self-starting youth a cost-effective, scalable income source to support their growth into formal employment. The best is that we can roll this out anywhere with any partner.”
New data from StatsSA reveal that South Africa’s jobless rate is now at a 14-year high, at a time when the country is in a technical recession.
“Unemployed youth are often exploited and excluded from opportunities to grow out of survivalist enterprises and develop into viable businesses,” says Byron Verreyne, Spazapp’s CTO. “By taking app technology a step further through innovative initiatives like Spazasparks, we can create real-time jobs and enable informal enterprise in the most impoverished areas so that our youth don’t have an inheritance of poverty.”
The feature allows youth wanting to make a difference in their own life the opportunity to generate income, experience, and skills from the sales of airtime, life insurance policies, electricity and conducting incentivised tasks such as surveys and brand training.
