M Mdladlana during Labour Budget Vote speech

17 May 2006

The government’s intensified drive to reduce the high scarce skills deficit
currently facing the country have already taken centre stage in the recently
launched Joint Initiative for Priority Skills Acquisition (JIPSA)
intervention.

This became clear today, 17 May, as Labour Minister Membathisi Mdladlana
detailed during his Budget Vote address in parliament the pace with which
skills training providers were moving in response to calls for intensified
efforts on scarce skills empowerment drive.

JIPSA is the skills component of the Accelerated Shared Growth Initiative of
South Africa (AsgiSA), which aims to increase the level of skills as a means to
grow the country’s economic growth to six percent through skills
development.

Minister Mdladlana told Parliament that the results of the current second
phase of the National Skills Development Strategy (NSDS) 2005-2009 demonstrated
how the Sector Education and Training Authorities (Setas) had heeded the
government’s call to make AsgiSA succeed by helping register more than double
the initial target within a year.

“In 2005 we set a target to register at least 50 000 learners in the scarce
skills field. We ended up with 116 425 learners registered,” the Minister
said.

As part of pursuing both the NSDS and JIPSA goals, the Department and its
social partners had initiated a process to identify scarce and critical skills
required by the economy.

“This process involves the development of a database that will include the
number of jobs to be created in response to scarce and critical skills
required,” he said.

These achievements were taking place at the backdrop of successful
apprenticeships of the NSDS 2001-2005 during which 170 926 learners were
registered into learnerships and apprenticeships.

Of these 109 674 or 64 percent were unemployed learners while 36 703 were
apprentices, contrary to perceptions that apprenticeship is dead.

A whopping 71 percent of learners were placed either in income generating
projects, employment or further training within three months after
training.

These, he said, included the fact that the rate at which the economy is
growing had prompted a question over the government’s ability to sustain it so
as to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) set by the United Nations
(UN).

Enquiries:
Mokgadi Pela
Cell: 082 808 2168

Issued by: Department of Labour
17 May 2006