iKasi Creative building bridges between young talent and real opportunities in the film and media industry.

A ground-breaking non-profit company is tackling one of South Africa's most pressing challenges - youth unemployment. As FAME Week Africa celebrates the continent's creative excellence, organisations like iKasi Creative are building bridges between young talent and real opportunities in the film and media industry.

According to the latest Quarterly Labour force survey (Q2: 2025), South Africa’s youth unemployment rate increased by 39 000 to 4,9 million, which remains unchanged at 46,1%, compared to the first quarter of 2025.

Director of iKasi Creative, Lamise Inglis, joined the Sakhsizwe team on Thursday, 14 August, to tell us more.

‘’4.9 million jobless youth is a gut wrenching number, but it is absolutely critical that we tackle youth unemployment through many different factors. At iKasi Creative, we realised we primarily are a training organization. Initially, iKasi, started with trying to give youth that are living in peri-rural and rural communities and even townships, some accessibility to the creative industry because we realised that there are nott many creative careers being taught in these communities. We initially lived out there to places like West Coast and Garden Route, Worcester, and other areas like Bonnivale, equipping these youth with basic production, formatting skills, but also teaching them the power that they have in their mobile device and how to create content through their mobile devices that are able to immediately generate an income; training them how to make little marketing videos for entrepreneurs and non-profits in their communities so that they can immediately create a video, edit the video, and sell it. That was our initial mission in these areas, but because of the rising unemployment, we realised that we need to have a dual approach. So we are beginning internships through our actual organisation besides the training that we roll out and we try to give a new pathway for graduates that come out of home and media and marketing schools, trying to place these graduates, either in non-profit organisations, but specifically to creative industry, we are also trying to place them in production companies.’’

COURTESY: Facebook: iKasi Creative

‘’IKasi’s training has been very practical-based. The way the training is being designed whether it is a boot camp or incubator, there is a lot of hands on training, there is a lot of leadership and sort of new world scenarios that you placed within our training. That was not enough. These should definitely bridge the gap between classroom learning and reality, specifically, in an industry like phone and television, where access to seats are very few and far between. For a lot of film school, students or graduates, they have to really create their own set reality, which means they need to find funding or find access to money, come up with the concept, and do a little shortfall in order to give them that practical experience of actually being on set.’’

‘’What we are now saying to industry and the creative industry like the film and television industry is work with organisations like iKasi Creatives, and give graduates at least one year of experience working with your organiaation. We will do the grunt work of accessing the graduates, doing initial interviews, etc., and making sure that they are ready to be placed with the production companies. We have done a trial, which we just took 10 interns and replaced these with our marketing and advertising interns that came out of the dream from marketing schools and we placed them with non-profit organisations and these guys (sic) are doing sterling work with these non-profits,’’ added Inglis.

Inglis admits that there is a difficult balance for any non-profit regarding funding, but believes that networking space is where it is at.

‘’The real connections were made at networking spaces, and you never know where that connection will lead and who will hear the story and then wants to support. So iKasi is a registered nonprofit; We have got PDO status, so we are able to issue an 18a for relevant, donations received. We have got partners that we have worked with, over the years; We've got a really good relationship with our sector SETA - MICT SETA, and we are an accredited trading provider. We try and balance everything and make sure that we check all the boxes so that we are able to access funding when the time arises and help as many youth as possible.’’

COURTESY: Facebook: iKasi Creative

She suggested that production companies should take on trainees on-set for a full year

‘’They can understand that you are working of a production company because in that, they will learn so much more than just having two or three weeks on set. So we are looking at a longer relationship between production companies, and interns,’’ said Director of iKasi Creative, Lamise Inglis.

LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW:

Done by: Mitchum George