The Digital Skills Impact Fund is a transformative, outcomes-based model set to reshape South Africa’s digital skills landscape over the next five years. The Fund does not finance training but instead will co-pay implementers for verified outcomes — ensuring international skilling standards, easier access to quality jobs, immediate impact, and a more sustainable talent pipeline. By addressing critical gaps left by existing training and employment programmes, the Fund will help to build an inclusive, employer-led pipeline of entry-level ICT talent for the tech-enabled economy.
By aligning funders, employers, training providers, and unemployed youth, the Fund acts as a catalyst for systemic change. It consolidates existing funding, drives employer accountability, enhances workforce readiness, promotes inclusion, and facilitates a workforce that works.
The Collective X acts as the Portfolio Manager and ensures the Fund has a structured and programmatic approach. Funders commit to the shared vision of improving long-term employment outcomes for Mzansi’s youth.
Additionality is at the heart of our financial support
Additionality represents our commitment to creating new, impactful solutions that don’t duplicate or displace what is already working, but rather improve the status quo in meaningful ways. For us, this means addressing critical market failures—such as ecosystem fragmentation, funding gaps, and misalignment with business needs—that hinder sustainable employment for youth in the digital sector. Through targeted financing programmes, Collective X aims to generate a multiplier effect: sparking long-term change, fostering independent adoption of solutions, and attracting continued investment to scale impact across the ecosystem.
Our next co-investment programme opens on 15 April 2025.
We have R50 million to support new work-integrated learning programmes that connect unemployed youth to real ICT job pathways.
We are looking to partner with employers who:
- Need entry-level ICT talent
- Value practical, work-based learning
- Want to help close the digital skills gap