The Gauteng government has embraced the idea of mall activations to help drive the youth towards its Y-AGE Youth and Graduate Entrepreneurship Development Programme. Because job creation is critical to sustainable future growth of our country, the Gauteng Economic Propeller (GEP) commissioned Unlimited’s Mall Active to set up information stands in seven major shopping malls across Johannesburg and Pretoria.
The Y-AGE Programme targets young school leavers and entrepreneurs, piloted by Gauteng’s MEC of Economic Development, Qedani Mahlangu. The initiative aims to assist the Gauteng Government in identifying 100 000 promising entrepreneurs, following which, they will assess their needs, train them and provide them with the funding to establish their enterprises.
“The campaign has been welcomed as a great success as a pilot project in Ekurhuleni, where thousands of young people were trained to run their own businesses,” says Travis Brown, GM of Unlimited’s mall activation specialist. ‘In expanding the programme the provincial government and GEP executed seven campaigns concurrently for one. Shoppers interested in the programme were able to go through the entire registration programme on the spot to ascertain whether they qualify for the training and financial support.”
Brown says the most effective way to “alert, educate and attract the desired target market to the project, is to get into a one-one-on situation where the youth spend extended dwell time, en masse”. It is envisaged that once prospective entrepreneurs have been through the programme, they will each hire between three and five people in order to assist the government in creating a million new jobs.
