Brought to you by the Department of Economic Development and Tourism (DEDAT)
The week-long programme provides a simulated or real-working environment for youth in the province to acquire working experience in the ICT scene while building their own technological startups.
During the programme, the youngsters work together to build a solution based on a predetermined theme that addresses a common issue in the Northern Cape province. Business development is of great focus and accordingly, the participants are taken through a Business Model Canvas session in which they create and map business cases for the solutions being developed.
To date, up to 4 annual editions with 288 scholars have been conducted in different parts of the Northern Cape province:
Participants of the VacWork will be challenged to come up with new solutions for their community in Springbok.
The participants will be assisted by the facilitators, coordinators and stakeholders.
01You will meet new friends, collegeus and potential co-founders of you next big idea.
02Each year the VacWork program goes to a diiferent town in the Northern Cape.
03Youngsters work together to build a solution that addresses a common issue in our province.
04You get to network with relevant players in the Innovation and technological space.
05Participants will get to gain the experience of how it feels to work in a startups.
06Our Schedual for the week
The VacWork will kick off with a dataquest where participants will be provided with datasets to study, come with story angles and the present findings from the data. These findings will be used to create the new solutions for the week.
With tools having been installed into the computers, teams will start working on on their solutions that have been formulated on day 1 of the programme.
Industry professionals will be invited to give presentations and engage the participants on career related matters.
Development of the solutions will continue. Tech Debate topics will be presented.
With guidance from the mentors, teams will increase efforts to build their solutions.
Last day of development for the solutions - teams also package their solutions in preparation for the presentations. Powerpoint slides will also be finalized.
Teams must submit their project material ahead of the presentations. Presentation order will be communicated with the teams for presentations.
Get to know our Mentors for this years VacWork in Springbok.
You can also apply to become a Mentor, just click on the button below our current mentors
Chairperson, NCDev Eocystem
System Developer, Geekulcha
CEO, Geekulcha
COO, Geekulcha
Here is some of our past VacWork events.
All participants for the 2022 VacWork in Springbok needs to register here.
Fill in the information to register for the Youth ICT and Business VacWork programme