Frequently asked questions about Bighearts Africa: services, programmes, and how to get involved.
Straight answers to the questions we hear most often.
In sponsor-funded placements, the young person's stipend is covered by the sponsor, so the main costs to your business are operational: supervision time, a workspace, and the tools the role needs. Some programmes ask hosts to contribute a portion of costs, and arrangements differ between sponsors, so the exact split is confirmed in your hosting agreement before anything starts. That's why hosting is often described as subsidised labour — the salary barrier is removed, not every cost.
Four things, essentially: meaningful work (a real role, not just errands), day-to-day supervision and mentorship from someone in your team, a safe and lawful workplace, and basic admin such as confirming attendance and joining periodic check-ins. You don't need an HR department — many hosts are very small teams, and the programme partner carries the contracting and administrative load around the placement.
The Village Dashboard is the platform that connects SMMEs to the network — placements, support, and tracking run through it. To get started, register your interest through the Bighearts Africa website and the team will guide you through onboarding, including what's needed to qualify as a host. If specifics like onboarding steps or requirements have changed, the website carries the current process.
Sometimes — and we're deliberately honest about how often. Across our network, roughly 25–30% of placed youth are currently absorbed into employment, most often by the business that hosted them. That's a meaningful outcome, but it isn't a guarantee, and no credible programme should promise one. What a placement reliably provides is a year of real experience, a track record, and — for hosts — a low-risk way to develop and evaluate someone before making a permanent hiring decision — which is exactly how many of our absorption stories start.
Often, yes — if there's genuinely enough work and supervision for each of them. Programmes assess this on real capacity, not ambition: every placed young person needs meaningful tasks, a named supervisor with time to guide them, and a workspace. Many SMMEs start with one placement, find their rhythm, and take a second in a later cycle. What we discourage is taking several at once as a first-time host — supervision stretches thinner than owners expect, and it's the young people who feel it first.
Usually more opportunity, not competition. When a mine, municipality, or large company funds a community-based programme, placements are distributed across local businesses — so established hosts are typically first in line, because they have a track record and their information is already in order. Anchor projects also tend to bring longer funding horizons and more support infrastructure than smaller cycles. Keeping your Dashboard profile current is the practical way to be visible when a project team builds its host list.
The major general-purpose assistants all offer free tiers that handle the everyday work — drafting quotes, replying to customers, organising admin — and a phone is enough to use them. Two safety rules matter more than the choice of tool: never paste customers' personal details into a tool you haven't checked (POPIA applies to your business too), and always check any figure, date, or promise before it goes out under your name. Start with one task for two weeks, then grow from there.
Real support, and the earlier you use it, the better it works. Every placement has a programme team behind it: check-ins, a contact person for problems, and experience with the issues that come up — absence, mismatched expectations, personal circumstances affecting work. Most wobbles are fixable with one facilitated conversation. Where a placement genuinely isn't working, the programme manages the change properly rather than leaving the host and young person stuck. What we ask of hosts is simply to flag early — a problem raised in week six is a fix; the same problem raised in month ten is a post-mortem.