In the windswept stillness of the Northern Cape, where the land stretches long and the sun casts its glow on dreams still in waiting, youth often grow up with immense potential but limited opportunity. This is a place of promise, but also of economic isolation, where a generation is hungry not just for jobs, but for a future they can build with their own hands.
Empowering futures: Karen van Staden (second from right) with the Achieve Skills team
In a province where skills shortages persist and unemployment remains stubbornly high, access to quality training is not just a developmental issue, it's a matter of dignity. The youth of the Northern Cape don’t lack ambition. They lack platforms to express it. Achieve Skills is stepping into that gap with intention and impact.
Building skills, restoring futures
Achieve Skills (Pty) Ltd is a Level 1 BBBEE contributor rooted in Kathu, offering accredited QCTO, ETDP and Service SETA full qualifications and skills programmes. Its work focuses not only on compliance, but on impact. For young people navigating life in under-resourced areas, this organisation offers something powerful: training that is relevant, accessible, and life-affirming.
“Skills development shouldn’t feel like a luxury. It should be a right and a tool that everyone, no matter their background, can use to shape their future,” says Ms Van Staden, managing director of Achieve Skills.
Whether it’s New Venture Creation, Early Childhood Development, or essential workplace soft skills like communication, emotional intelligence, and time management, the courses on offer are crafted to match the lived realities of learners not abstract policy objectives.
Training with context
Achieve Skills doesn’t approach learning in isolation. Its strength lies in how it sees people as more than numbers on a register. The team provides ongoing learner support, mentorship, and flexible delivery models that ensure no one is left behind.
“We don’t train to tick boxes. We train to change lives,” explains Van Staden. From unemployed youth to aspiring entrepreneurs, the programmes serve a broad demographic but with one unified goal: to give South Africans the tools to rewrite their economic stories.
From individuals to ecosystems
Beyond learner-focused training, Achieve Skills also offers consulting and support services, including:
Workplace approvals
SETA accreditation applications
Grant submissions
Skills programme designThis positions the organisation not only as a trainer, but as a strategic partner in the broader skills development landscape – one that understands both the paperwork and the people.
“We want to be more than a training provider. We want to be a partner in building communities of value,” says Van Staden. “You don't just leave here with a certificate. You leave here with a story, a purpose, and a plan.”
Rewriting the narrative of the Northern Cape
What Achieve Skills is doing in the Northern Cape is more than training, it’s reconstruction. It’s helping shape a new generation of confident, capable, employable, and entrepreneurial individuals who no longer have to migrate or shrink themselves to fit in.
In a region so often overlooked, Achieve Skills proves that excellence can be homegrown and that with the right vision, skills can become a currency of freedom.
For a province rich in minerals but starved of equitable opportunity, organisations like this are not just service providers. They are torchbearers.
“As a beneficiary of Anglo American Zimele’s enterprise development programme, Achieve Skills has been empowered with critical resources and networks that allow us to expand our reach and deepen our impact in the Northern Cape’s youth community,” Van Staden concludes.
