Over nearly two decades, social enterprise – Safe-Hub – has built a solution for achieving systemic social change by addressing youth unemployment and structural inequality. What it has learnt: it’s a team sport but you need the right players.
Johannesburg, 28 July 2026: Youth unemployment and social inequality remain among South Africa’s biggest and most persistent challenges. Yet no single programme, organisation or sector can solve them alone. While many interventions focus on individual solutions such as skills training, sport, education or job placement, Safe-Hub Founder, Florian Zech, believes the greatest catalyst for lasting change is partnership. Since establishing the first Safe-Hub in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, in 2007, Zech has seen how collaboration between business, government, civil society and local communities has been invaluable in creating opportunities for young people, strengthening communities and supporting more inclusive local economic development.
Long-term partnerships, lasting impact
“There are plenty of organisations doing really good work. The problem is many of them are operating in silos,” says Zech. “We realised early on that if we were going to have an impact at the scale we were targeting, we would need to provide a platform that enables businesses, government and community organisations to collaborate around shared outcomes. That really has been key to Safe-Hub’s success. We started as an organisation; now what we have is a model for systemic change.”
What Safe-Hub has learnt is that the real value is unlocked when like-minded businesses and organisations enter into long-term relationships. This model allows Safe-Hub to link talent with opportunity and demand, creating intentional pathways for young people to improve their prospects and, by extension, uplifting entire communities.
“Creating sustainable social change takes time,” says Robin Petersen, Development Director at Safe-Hub. “Long-term partnerships allow us to build trust, innovate together, and create measurable impact over many years. They also enable companies to move beyond supporting individual activities and become genuine partners in the journey of young people and the long-term transformation of communities.”
Partners are intentionally diverse, covering both the public and private sectors, as well as NGOs.
One of Safe-Hub’s long-standing partners is the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA) and its Development Lab (DLAB) Programme. “The DLAB Programme is one of the bank’s strategic initiatives in which the bank is intentional about convening and investing in community-based platforms that enable access to skills, to opportunities, and to networks that matter,” says Carey Jooste, Head of the DLAB Programme at DBSA. “It is not simply a physical space. It is a working ecosystem of opportunity, designed to support young people as they move along their employability and growth journey.”
Jooste continues: “The bank recognised over and above the infrastructure investment, connection between young people and opportunity, between training and jobs, and between potential and real economic participation was important. This is where the partnership came to life between DBSA and Safe-Hub.”
“DBSA has been our strategic partner for over six years and is the custodian of the national DLAB framework implemented through Safe-Hub in multiple communities across South Africa,” says Petersen. “Safe-Hub acts as one of the implementing partners at the community level, activating DLAB precincts as integrated opportunity hubs that connect young people to education, employability, entrepreneurship and economic participation.”
Support that goes beyond funding
Another longstanding partner is Knorr-Bremse Global Care (KBGC), the social responsibility arm of the German group Knorr-Bremse. “KBGC is a shareholder of Safe-Hub Global (alongside AMANDLA), so it’s a long-term structural commitment rather than a once-off funder,” explains Zech.
Zech adds that KBGC came in as an equal partner, providing shared expertise and employee engagement alongside funding, deliberately breaking the traditional donor-and-recipient model.
“At Safe-Hub, we believe in building partnerships that go beyond traditional corporate giving by combining financial investment with a company’s expertise, people, products, services and networks to create opportunities for young people,” says Zech. “We work closely with each partner to understand their strengths and identify where we can create genuine shared value for both the company and the communities we serve.”
KBGC is a great example of how effective this kind of partnership can be. The company hires young people directly from Safe-Hub’s PlayMaker programme. Designed to develop young adults from the community, the year-long certified learnership combines skills training, coaching and hands-on experience leading activities. PlayMakers become role models and mentors for younger children, building confidence, learning responsibility and developing leadership skills along the way.
“A PlayMaker has become a mark of readiness, almost a quality seal: these young people come prepared, capable and ready to build their careers,” says Zech.
That was certainly the case for Karabo, who joined the Alexandra Safe-Hub as a PlayMaker through his love of football. “Alexandra is a small township with a lot of drugs and a lot of gangsters. So it’s a place where you have to keep yourself busy,” he says. For Karabo, who left a difficult home life at the age of 16, football became a kind of therapy. “Every time I wanted to run away from the house, I’d just go to soccer practice and be with my friends, be happy, be myself,” he says.
A catalyst for a better life
“That’s when life started actually,” says Karabo referring to the day he joined Safe-Hub as a PlayMaker; a position he describes as “the best thing that could happen to anyone”.
“Being a PlayMaker made me career-ready because it equipped me with skills like teamwork, accountability and responsibility,” he says. Those skills paid off when, shortly before his programme ended, he had the opportunity to interview for a job with Knorr-Bremse. He went on to secure a position at the company’s Johannesburg premises, where he further developed his skills and gained valuable industry experience. “I used to wonder if I was ready to build my own future,” he says. “But now I know I am, and it’s going to be great.”
Stories like Karabo’s show the impact that can be achieved when partners whose values align combine their efforts under a shared purpose.
The challenge is no longer understanding what young people need. The challenge is aligning the right partners around proven solutions that can be scaled. After years of refining the process, Safe-Hub is doing exactly that.
About Safe-Hub:
Safe-Hub is an established, international social enterprise that works with local partners to create safe, inclusive spaces where young people from under-resourced communities can access the care, resources and opportunities they need to thrive. Through holistic, multi-purpose hubs, Safe-Hub supports young people across their full development journey – from early childhood through to economic participation. Its award-winning sustainability model, developed by AMANDLA Social Enterprises, is rooted in catalysing communities to support themselves by building local leadership, skills and systems that enable long-term impact. Safe-Hub is committed to taking collective action to overcome global inequality. By working together, we rise together to realise our vision for an equal world.
Safe-Hub is currently active in South Africa, Germany, the United States, India and Côte d’Ivoire.
Visit: https://safe-hub.org/
Facebook: Safe-Hub Global
Instagram: safe_hub_global
About the DBSA:
The Development Bank of Southern Africa is one of the leading development financial institutions on the continent. Our primary purpose is delivering impactful development finance solutions that ignite transformative change in South Africa and on the rest of the African continent. Improving the quality of life of people in Africa is the fundamental focus of our development impact. We aim to bend the arc of history towards shared prosperity through multifaceted investments in sustainable infrastructure and human capacity.
Our product solutions span all phases of the infrastructure development value chain from infrastructure planning and project preparation, across a range of financing and non-financing investments to infrastructure implementation and delivery. Our primary areas of focus include Energy, ICT, Transport, Water and Sanitation. Our secondary area of focus includes Education, Housing and Health.
Press Contact:
Mantis Communications
Kerry Simpson
Tel: 079 438 3252
Email: [email protected]
