Improving employability

Teach For All, committed to addressing the worldwide problem of educational inequity, is driven by the idea that every child, regardless of their parents’ socio-economic status, should have access to quality education. To this end, Teach For All partner organizations recruit and train exceptional university graduates and young professionals to serve as teachers ("teaching participants") for two years at a school in a high-need community. This approach brings double benefits. While students improve their academic performance over the short/medium term, the teaching participants take on responsibility as agents of change, expand their horizons and build their leadership skills. Currently, more than 15,000 teaching participants are reaching around 1,1 million students.

As part of our commitment, we provide support to Teach For All's global parent organization as well as to more than 20 national organizations in Asia Pacific, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Europe. The Group supports the Teach For All network financially and through the active involvement of our employees who contribute their time, experience and professional know-how in partnership activities.

Employees of the Group volunteer their time to mentor the youth. They seek to inspire and motivate these young individuals as they prepare their first steps into the work of work by sharing their own professional and personal experiences.

The partnership covers a wide variety of program elements such as:

• Job orientation – to educate youth about the job market
• Life skills training – to be better prepared for entering the job market
• Exposure to professional working environment – to gain initial work experience
• Training and support for establishing own businesses

The program started in Madagacar in 2009 and expanded rapidly to round about 50 countries worldwide by 2019.

Find out more about GoTeach in Madagascar in the following podcast:

The local ownership of the GoTeach program is considered a unique feature of the partnership. In every country, SOS Children's Villages and DPDHL staff collaborate to plan and implement GoTeach activities. Given the large number of program countries, and the differences between these contexts, the formats and implementation of activities varies greatly. Nevertheless, all activities are aimed at training and guiding the youth and/or sharing personal career development stories and experience. As compared to other corporate citizenship programs, GoTeach focuses very much on empowering youth by sharing professional expertise. This makes the GoTeach partnership exceptional.

Drawing on our years of experience working with SOS Children’s Villages, we have launched the joint initiative YouthCan! to encourage other companies to engage on behalf of young people in similar ways. Gaining the support of additional partners is key to expanding this work with young people.