Transcript response by Deputy Minster Buti Manamela on the Employment Morbidity and Mortality Patterns Report during Youth Month, Stellenbosch University
Statistician-General, Mr Pali Lehohla,
Members of the media.
There is a big concern around youth unemployment and the fact that it is increasing. The Presidential Working Group on Youth, which the President convened earlier in the month looked at the type of interventions that needs to be made in order to halt the increasing rate of youth unemployment.
We also think that there is a relationship between youth unemployment and various other problems in society including the health of our young people. That is why the Presidential Working Group has set up various work streams, the main one being on the economy and then one on education and skills development, the other one specifically focuses on health issues.
As you may have seen on the report there that there are non-natural causes that lead to death especially amongst young black males. There are other work streams such as nation building and optimising the youth machinery.
We have said with the Department of Economic Development that two years ago various social actors signed the Youth Employment Accord. It has now been two years since the signing of the Youth Accord and commitments were made. We need to come out and say what has been the impact. Cleary from this – and other various factors that we will be taking into consideration, we need to more in terms of focusing on dealing with youth unemployment.
Now there are five key interventions that came from the Presidential Working Group on Youth. We will ensure that they are all implemented! Some of the interventions have already been launched as part of the youth month programmes, and some of them we will be launching in the not so distant future.
The one being to support and encourage young people to be entrepreneurs because, we think that the rush for creation of jobs may not have necessarily yielded the result that we wanted. We have also seen that over the last few years there has been more jobs yielded from interventions in youth enterprises – in fact small businesses have contributed more than 40% of the country’s employment rate.
That is why we launched in June the mentorship programme with the Mara Foundation. We have also with the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC), National Youth Development Agency (NYDA) and Small Enterprise Finance Agency (SEFA) created a platform for funding of those youth enterprises to the tune of R2.7 billion which will support youth owned small businesses.
One of the main causes of the small businesses not succeeding is because government does not pay them on time. There is a unit that has been set-up in the Presidency focusing specifically on ensuring that small businesses are paid on time.
In the next two years with the Department of Higher Education we will be launching the Cooperatives Institute as a way of intervening and encouraging young people to enter into small businesses and encouraging innovation amongst young people.
We believe that we can in the next few years mentor, create and encourage at least 1 million young entrepreneurs. We think that this would make a huge impact.
Then we are launching the national youth skills intervention which will specifically target young people between the ages of 19 and 24. We believe this is where the big problem is in terms of where young people are not economically active. It is one project that we believe will help.
There is a task team that has been set up to look at a framework on National Youth Service (NYS). We do not think that NYS should be equal to getting young people in the military. Yes there are certain values that young people need to learn but a successful NYS programme must be one that imparts skills on short term and long term so that they are able to be employed through public service programmes or create their own small businesses.
The decline in skilled workers shows that the direction in which we have taken in terms of skills development may have its own flaws. One of the things that I said earlier was that government is investing a lot of money in public infrastructure development projects. Now you have - probably rightly so - students within the social sciences but we need more engineers, plumbers, electricians, we need artisans and for young people to work in the construction sector if we are to deploy them into all these projects.
Similarly government seeks a programme that would develop all those skills. That is why there is an expansion of the FET sector and beyond the (now TVET) FET sector there would be a launch of the Community Colleges in order to deal with those hard-core skills. We are talking to young people and telling them that the notion of work being that of dressing in a tie and a suit with a corner office needs to change. We need to change our perception and notion of work.
We think that all of these interventions together with all of the things that government is doing will address the problems of unemployment and the problems around health.
One very scary thing is the risky behaviour among young people. There is a link between HIV/Aids, TB etc. and the risky behaviour of young people. Social Development did a survey some time ago that showed that 49% of young people below the age of 18 were exposed to alcohol which led them to abuse alcohol, which led them to experimenting with drugs, and led them to engage in unprotected sex, that led to teenage pregnancies and contracting HIV.
The abuse of alcohol is also a cause for car accidents so young people drink and get behind the wheel and cause accidents. That is another issue that we need to look at in addressing the risky behaviour amongst young people and how that has actually led to non-natural causes of death among young people.
Violence as a result of all these factors is also a cause for concern. Last week we were graduating learners in conflict resolution and mediation and we think that it is one of the ways in which we can help young people to realise that violence is not the way to resolve conflict - whatever forms of conflict that may be encountered and those are some of the interventions we have made in equipping young people with conflict resolution skills. Those things help us realise where we are making progress and which places to focus on and which type of programmes we should upscale in order to make progress.
This report is very helpful to us in making the necessary interventions in order to transform the lives of our young people.
Thank you!
