Flexibility has been core to the survival of a business that had the misfortune to launch just as Covid-19 hit South Africa – and now the business is not only surviving, it’s thriving! The brainchild of three dynamic Cape Town Jewish entrepreneurs, Yenza fills a significant gap in the educational landscape with its innovative edtech solution to a range of needs relating to career guidance, study choices and funding for studies.
Former Johannesburgers, Farrel Strul and Jared Molko, joined forces with ex-Herzlian, Nathan Burstein, to create an app that is certainly making its mark in the world of edtech.
With Jared, a former Google staffer, having had an interest in the recruitment industry, joining forces with Farrel, who has decades of experience in the world of education, there was certainly a great deal of useful thinking and knowledge. “As for Nathan,” explains Farrel, the CFO of Yenza, “he is the tech brain.” And the technology side of their business is crucial. What they have developed allows young people to access a significant amount of information about studies, careers, financial aid for studies, and provides an assessment tool that helps to guide a person in the direction that they are most suited for.
According to Farrel, there is a huge need in our country and beyond our borders for meaningful careers guidance. In fact, he says, “The majority of youth have no access to formal career services, and those services that do exist are mostly outdated or not useful. Also, it’s costly to access valuable career guidance, and so thousands of young people in South Africa are excluded from the guidance that they need. After all, what does one know about the world of work when you’re 18?”
It’s against this background that Yenza was born. The company states its mission to be: “To guide young people to reach their full career potential, fast tracking their employability and linking them to opportunities.”
The app that has been delivered caters for a range of services, including:
• Assessments
• Career matches
• Study choices
• Skills courses
• A CV builder
• Sources of funding for studies
• Speaking to experts.
When the team launched the Yenza app in March 2020, “…the plan was a B2B model targeting schools. Covid resulted in almost all schools closing for most of the year. In addition.the plan was to target individuals to sign up as users. But, it soon became evident that it made better business sense to develop a B2B model. Also, approaching schools proved to be problematic because schools operate on shoestring budgets and lack funds. “We started seeing the benefits of a different approach once we brought in the big corporates like ABSA and Standard Bank,” Farrel explains. “Companies like this use the app to identify potential staff members to bring onto their leadership programmes. The various assessment tools included in the app are particularly useful for them to get a good idea of a person’s potential and their strengths.”
Another popular use case for corporates is a B2B2C model that focuses on customer acquisition and value added services to the youth market segment.
Beyond the corporate sector, the app has also been adopted by some of the major private school organisations, such as South Africa’s largest school group, Curro, which gives Yenza access to 10 000 learners, and ADvTECH. Redhill, Yeshiva College and The King David Schools in Johannesburg are also clients of Yenza. “Because of the numbers of learners in these educational sites,” Farrel explains, “this sort of arrangement means that we have been able to monetise our solution and generate the sort of revenue that we need to grow.”
While the business started in South Africa – and has worked extensively with agencies like Wesgro to help expand the local economy of our province – the founders have their eyes very clearly set on expansion into a number of regions: elsewhere in Africa, the Latam region, India and the Middle East. As Farrel explains, “A big focus for us has been to provide the app in a range of languages, and so the product is now available in a plethora of languages including English, Afrikaans, isiZulu, isiXhosa, Amharic (which is spoken in Ethiopia), Swahili, Hindi, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Modern Arabic.”
Even though the app provides essential tools and information at a very affordable price, there are those who still cannot afford it. And so, with a socially conscious mindset, the founders have made it available for free to learners in 850 Quintile 1-3 schools in South Africa.
Accolades for Yenza come not only from the founders’ knowledge that their work has been a huge achievement. It’s also seen in the numbers of learners they are reaching, the appeal of the app to their partners, and in the many awards they have received.”The most recent of these is being listed on HolonIQ’s annual list of the 50 most promising EdTech startups in sub-Saharan Africa. (See https://www.holoniq.com/notes/2023-africa-edtech-50).” Yenza has also been selected as the Inaugural MasterCard Foundation Fellowship winner for 2023. The firm was recognised as the winner of the Future of Work Injini EdTech competition in 2022, and as the winner of the 2022 GESA (Global EdTech Awards) for South Africa.
• Published in the February 2024 issue – Click here to start reading.
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