Lucha Lunako envisions a world where youth leverage their agency and skills to build sustainable careers, overcoming challenges from their upbringing. Equipped with mental, emotional, and competency tools, they become active citizens who drive economic growth and reduce poverty.
We provide scalable youth development solutions through innovative approaches and partnerships that create measurable impact. By addressing the root causes of poverty and inequality, we help youth shift from surviving to thriving through foundational skills, behavior change, and pathways to decent work.
As an impact-driven organization, our research-backed Lucha programmes and role in the Youth Development Collaboration Lab (YD Co-Lab) foster collaboration, knowledge sharing, and lasting change in the sector.
Guided by experienced entrepreneurs and decades of corporate experience, we bring a values-driven approach to every engagement. Alana Bond, Michelle Green and Nizenande Machi combined their skills, expertise and passion to contribute to solving the youth employability challenge in South Africa.
Alana Bond
Alana is a serial entrepreneur who started her first business in high school. After completing her Business Science degree with Honours in Finance from the University of Cape Town, she spent several years in management consulting with Accenture. In 2012 Alana started her own consultancy to focus on impact, and has gained over 20 years of consulting experience in strategy, B-BBEE, economic development and social enterprise. After several years of exposure to youth development, she co-founded Lucha Lunako to focus on identifying and addressing the root causes of youth unemployability. Alana’s focus is to strategically lead Lucha Lunako, build solutions for scale, grow partnerships and oversee all things financial.
Michelle Green
Michelle Green is a fan of financial freedom for everyone and a passionate advocate for financial inclusion in our country. After achieving her Business Science (Hons) LLB degree from the University of Cape Town, Michelle gained 20 years’ experience in financial services, working in asset management, corporate and retail banking. As director and head of programmes at Lucha Lunako, her behavioural science background and extensive corporate experience bring a wealth of insight into developing experiential courses that help young people to succeed in the workplace and to provide income for their future.
Nizenande Machi
Nizenande Machi is a Relationship Systems Strategist, creating human-centred frameworks for African development. Nizenande has a Bachelor of Commerce degree in Management Studies with Finance from the University of Cape Town. She also holds a Certificate on Thought Leadership for Africa’s Renewal from the Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute at UNISA. In 2019, she participated in a research case to understand the South African youth development landscape, whilst advocating for a new way to reimagine capacity building in a country where over 70% of the youth are unemployed. This research report is now the cornerstone of Lucha Lunako.
Narrated by co-founder and former director, Nizenande Machi introduces the compelling reasons behind our founding and the core beliefs that drives us.
“Our most grave and pressing challenge is youth unemployment. It is therefore a matter of great urgency that we draw young people in far greater numbers into productive economic activity.”
– President Cyril Ramaphosa
Lucha Lunako Organisation Profile (2023)
The profile presents an overview of our mission, vision, offerings, and initiatives. It also introduces our team, partners and clients. As well as testimonials and the benefits of partnering with us to foster the growth and success of young people
Lucha Lunako Annual Review (2023)
The review highlights our initiatives, progress and achievements in our efforts to address youth unemployment through whole-person developmental programmes focused on behaviour change.
Youth Development Re-imagined Report (2020)
Click the sections below to learn more about our background and development
Lucha Lunako was founded after several years of lived experience by the co-founders in the Youth Development sector – where we observed that many of the commonly held assumptions and theories regarding youth development seemed to be false.
After many years of experience in the youth development space, we observed various assumptions and beliefs about youth unemployment that did not hold true nor seemed to be working.
Our observations revealed that providing technical training and workplace readiness skills to youth alone does not produce the desired results. We also determined that the current trend for organisations and corporates to try to develop so called “soft” skills including workplace readiness using a classroom lecture based approach was simply a waste of resources. Yet we inherently believe that our youth are talented and have the potential to be successful, and need assistance in unlocking their talent and gaining access to work-related opportunities. We realised that we needed to rethink the approach to developing young people and helping them to prepare for life beyond school, especially the world of work. We realised we needed to go deeper into the root cause issues of youth unemployment including the role which trauma and poor mental health plays in our society.
In 2019, we decided to embark on a journey of discovery - to dig into the true causes and potential solutions to youth employability by undertaking an extensive research project. In addition to significant desktop research, we also carried out group discussions and interviews with experts, youth organisation leaders, skills development organisations, training academies, large corporates, SMEs, SETAs and others tasked with the development and/or management of youth as well as, of course, the youth themselves.
A key finding in our research is that most youth lack well-formed healthy foundations, including an awareness of their own agency. This makes it almost impossible for youth to absorb technical information and build technical skills because they are negatively affected by factors such as a lack of confidence, limiting beliefs, trauma, and difficulty in processing emotions.
Yet an individual who is thriving in the workplace - and can perform successfully in their role - is someone who is healthy and well. It is therefore our view that every youth development learning intervention must first start with building the foundations of the person before and while building technical skill.
By identifying and understanding how young people are affected by poverty and inequality at their root causes, we developed a powerful theory of change focused on shifting youth mindsets from surviving to thriving; and building understanding around pathways to decent work.
We designed a set of guiding principles and a new trademarked holistic youth development and support framework which yields both an immediate benefit to the individual, but importantly, also influences and affects the individual’s long term trajectory towards a successful and fulfilled life - while positively influencing their friends, family and community.
In March 2020, we published the Youth Development Re-imagined Report, which presented the current state of youth development in South Africa. Our objectives for developing and publishing this report were to:
- Engage within the youth development sector to establish what is and isn’t working;
- Propose guiding principles for organisations implementing youth development;
- Consider the impact of trauma and what role addressing trauma should play in youth development;
- Propose a development framework for developing foundations in youth, which is more holistic in its approach than providing technical skills, workplace readiness and/or work experience; and
- Propose key programme practices for maximum effectiveness.
In our view, meaningful impact can best be achieved through the following strategy:
- Integration of a more holistic approach to youth development with more deliberate efforts to pathway young people;
- Adoption of a new framework to guide youth development policy, investment and interventions;
- More active consideration of key guiding principles and proven best practices to inform programme design and implementation; and
- While there are successful youth development programmes, they don't reach a large number of people. Therefore we must create and provide scalable solutions that are easy to replicate, allowing them to be widely implemented by anyone eager to make an impact.
We believe a radical call to action across South Africa is needed - and for better coordination within the youth development ecosystem to collaborate to solve these challenges and ensure our youth represent the future opportunity for our country, and not a future deficit.
For more details, please visit Our Approach page and read our Youth Development Re-imagined Report.
As a result of our research, our co-founders decided to launch Lucha Lunako, which means “The Youth Have It” in English. (Note: Lucha Lunako is not a direct translation, but a colloquial use incorporating more than one South African official language.) This is because it is our principal belief that the youth are not a problem to be solved. They have innate value, talent to be nurtured and a purpose to discover and enjoy. In other words, young people already have “IT”. They have what it takes to be successful, but need development programmes that provide holistic support, providing strong foundations, in order to unlock their potential.
Our purpose is to re-imagine youth development – to design, implement and inspire innovative and scalable solutions to counter the youth unemployment crisis and to measure the impact of those solutions. We aspire to substantially shift the needle on youth development in South Africa and beyond.
A key step in our process was becoming a co-founder and significant financial contributor to the Youth Development Collaboration Lab (YD Co-Lab), an association of several hundred youth development organisations across the country. Through this network we foster collaboration and knowledge sharing across the sector for greater impact.
With action research as our organisational cornerstone, we began developing a series of programmes (learning journeys), research projects and other initiatives to move our agenda forward. Clients who have used our Learnership and YES Youth implementation services over the past few years have contributed directly to our research and development work on how to truly impact our youth and enabled us to develop our value-adding Lucha programmes.
Lucha Lunako is now a thriving social enterprise moving (in the jargon of commercial entrepreneurship) from startup to scaleup. We cannot achieve the impact we want to see in youth development on our own. Collaboration and partnerships with government, the private sector, civil society and philanthropic organisations are critical to success. Together, we can do something about the challenges our youth are facing.