Agricultural training of unemployed youth
Vastfontein Community Transformation (VCT) is a non-profit company whose focus is to assist people in the community who are victims of systemic poverty, through education, skills development and social support. VCT has been training unemployed youth in agriculture for the past two years and has seen great success.
The scope of this document focusses on skills development for unemployed youth between the ages of 18 and 35 with the potential of initially becoming micro- and co-op farmers and even progressing to commercial farmers over time. In the first place, the program empowers young people to have sustainable food production for their own households and from there become contributors to the local economy.
Program Overview
The program is SETA accredited and has four phases which can be depicted as follows; as can be seen all students donāt necessarily make it to āFarming as a businessā:
Case Study Research Paper done by GIZ in 2015
Fact & Figures
Testimonials
Every year we train approximately 300 unemployed youth from 6 surrounding communities as subsistence farmers followed up by 6 mentorship visits, from which approximately 225 will come back after 3 months for Phase 2 āFarming togetherā training followed up by 6 mentorship visits.
From each of the 6 communities we identify 5 community mentors/co-ordinators to receive further training and finally we identify the top 20 students to be trained in small business development.
We know this training makes a difference to families who are currently barely surviving, enabling them to become worthy citizens who are contributors to their families, community and the local economy
Companies can participate by supporting as many candidates that they can for which they receive BEE skills development points as well as Art. 18A tax exemption. For the students that progress to small business development ā Enterprise development points can also be gained which could grow into supply chain possibilities if produce is purchased from them.
For more information, please email us