One of SA’s leading NGOs, Vukani-Ubuntu Community Development Projects, has joined hands with Lincoln Electric of South Africa - Technology Leaders in the field of welding, cutting & joining for over 100-yrs. Lincoln is co-sponsoring Vukani’s “Job Shop” project in eMalahleni / Witbank, Mpumalanga. The Job Shop is a unique employment generating project and goes a long way towards solving SA’s endemic unemployment problems - particularly in the “critical and scarce-skills” sector.

Vukani engaged with a local engineering fabrication SMME facility, FACON Engineering, to create a unique model encompassing:

• Assessment of unemployed work-seekers.
• Practical up-skills training, in scarce and critical skills (industry-specific).
• On-the-job training in an engineering & manufacturing facility.
• Direct placement of up-skilled job-seekers into gainful employment.

All Under One Roof
This programmes targets in particular young people, especially young parents, but a primary aim is to capacitate as many women as possible – we aim to break down the barriers that assert that women cannot successfully compete with men in the Artisanal Sectors -
For the first Phase, 50% of accepted applicants were women.

This is the beginning of a long-term relationship and international partnership between the IDC (largest industrial development organization in Africa), Lincoln Electric and the EU (European Union) – who is set to donate R6-million this year.  The Job Shop was initiated by Vukani-Ubuntu and supported by seed-funding from the IDC. Lincoln Electric recently donated a large number of state-of-the-art welding equipment to the Job Shop Project, as a beneficiation gesture and in line with their CSI strategy.

Lincoln Electric has done it again and has proven their commitment to skills and enterprise development within the countries they trade. The first tranche of this equipment has been received and has been put to good use immediately - it is currently used for training welders and will go a long way towards contributing to the necessary up-skilling of our trainees - a much-needed skill in SA.