Programme Director;
Honoured guests;
Ladies and gentlemen;
All protocol observed.
On behalf of the provincial government of KwaZulu-Natal, we wish to express our delight at being invited to address this congregation of energetic and vibrant young leaders. Allow us, Programme Director, to also take this opportunity to thank you for choosing our beautiful city of Durban to host this auspicious event and trust that you will consider hosting more of your events here.
Programme Director, this congregation takes place at an opportune time when the KwaZulu-Natal provincial government is placing youth as an apex priority in our economic development agenda. In South Africa and in KwaZulu-Natal, we view the Youth as an important segment of the population that, although plagued by many social ills, still possesses potential and a passion to ensure success in their lives and to seeing the economic prosperity of our country.
As we approach the month of June, as a country, we are reminded that we have experienced, first-hand, how challenges facing the youth can bring about radical change in society through the formation of powerful youth movements. In our own setting, some of the most powerful and successful underground movements during the struggle against apartheid were masterminded by youth.
Whereas the youth in South Africa during apartheid used stones and barricades to demonstrate their discontent, their present counterparts are empowered to use education and skills to demonstrate their abilities. We, therefore, have no illusions as to the strength and potential of our youth, equipped with knowledge, supported through various government initiatives to ensure their success in life.
We would like to commend the World Islam Economic Forum for creating this space where youth can be stimulated and engaged in a positive way. It is through such platforms, that we encourage youth to be part of the solution to overcome challenges that they face, and to sharpen the abilities in ensuring their effective participation in the economy. Some of the words that come to mind when one thinks of youth are: brilliant, resilient, resolute, enthusiastic, passionate, assertive, potential, fearless, innovative. These same words used to describe youth have also been used to describe some of the world renowned leaders who have been successful in many sectors of society. The challenge that we, as present day leaders, face is how to nurture these characteristics in our youth and harness them to ensure that our societies thrive under youth leadership.
This occasion allows us the opportunity to reflect on the current youth employment situation and the progress that we have made in ensuring that our youth in the province have practical strategies and programmes to ensure their participation in the economic development of the country. In this respect, we would like to mention our stance on youth economic empowerment in our country and province.
The youth empowerment agenda is a priority for the South African government reflected by the various pieces of legislation that aim to address the challenges of unemployment and poverty. These include, inter-alia the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), Growth Employment and Redistribution (GEAR), Accelerated Growth Initiative for South Africa (ASGISA), Broad- Based Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE), New Growth Path (NGP), the National Development Plan (NDP), National Integrated Youth Development Strategy and the Provincial Growth and Development Strategy (PGDS).
These strategies all acknowledge the need to integrate the youth into the mainstream economy through customised youth orientated interventions. The provincial government is also finalising a Youth Economic Empowerment Strategy (YEES). The purpose of this youth framework is to devise appropriate programmes that provide meaningful opportunities to ensure the participation in the mainstream economy of all young people in the province. The provincial government is developing the YEES out of an ardent desire to finding a lasting solution to the myriad of challenges facing the province’s youth in an economy fraught with jobless growth and other hurdles.
The strategy encourages the youth to flourish as active, innovative agents that catalyse and shape the province’s future. The young have always caught the attention of policy makers because despite the many challenges that they face, they remain a major resource for a nation’s development. However, if they are to truly become a resource that reaches its fullest potential one needs to understand the pitfalls that they face as a segment of the population.
South Africa as part of the global economy is facing a largely unknown economic future. Although this affects everyone in society, it could be argued that the youth, in particular, bear the brunt of many of the economic hardships. In South Africa, it is not uncommon that many young people find themselves in a complex reality where the remnants of apartheid linger even though many did not experience apartheid first hand. With South Africa’s youth unemployment rate hovering around the 50% mark, the reality is that young people are experiencing a society where for many, poverty and violence prevails and certainty about what the future holds is unpredictable.
This is particularly disconcerting in the context of KwaZulu-Natal, which has the third highest poverty rates in the country and has more than 65% of young people living in households that operate below the poverty line. Added to that, the burden of HIV/AIDS and lack of access to high quality education, among other social tribulations, leads to the young feeling despondent and disenfranchised.
Programme Director, while South Africa’ situation is pressing to say the least, however it is part of the global trend of youth unemployment. Just recently, the United Nations announced that youth unemployment was likely to rise globally to 12.8% by 2018, wiping out gains made in the recent economic recovery. The report by the International Labour Organisation said the rate of unemployment among people aged between 15 and 24 was 12.4% globally in 2012 up from 12.3% in 2011. The report further stated that the rate is expected to climb to 12.6% in 2013 with an estimated 73.4 million young people out of work – as more of them leave the work force or give up looking for work.
The highest regional rates in 2012 were 28.3% in the Middle East and 23.7% in North Africa. The lowest rates were South Asia, with 9.3%, and East Asia at 9.5%,” said the report Another challenge our youth faces is access to credit to capitalise their micro-informal businesses. Despite having brilliant ideas, the youth tend to be regarded as a high risk as they do not possess the required experience, expertise and collateral to secure the credit needs. This inability to access finance means they are often unable to access project funding from the formal financial institutions. Inevitably, the vicious poverty cycle is perpetuated as their businesses remain merely aspirational and micro in nature, providing income for subsistence purposes only.
How then, can young people in these situations be expected to be the leaders and change makers that will ensure the continued growth and transformation of our nation?
Ladies and gentlemen, given their energy, enthusiasm and innovativeness, young people have the potential to contribute immensely in the socio-economic development of our nation. In line with the words of the former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan who said that “A society that cuts itself off from its youth severs its lifeline” we as the government acknowledge that it is paramount that the youth be placed at the forefront of building the economy of the country.
There is a need, therefore, to create an enabling environment and it is our collective responsibility as the government, the private sector, and our various social partners to design and implement practical programmes to generate decent employment, reduce poverty among the youth and economically empower them to play a more meaningful role in the development and upliftment of their communities and the nation at large.
Our youth are not only expected to be inheritors of the future, but have to be prepared for a meaningful contribution towards the transformation of our society that thrives for the entrenchment of democratic values and civil liberties for all our citizens and human kind in general.
The KwaZulu-Natal YEES, was therefore, penned to acknowledge and value the youth as national assets, whose needs and aspirations should be addressed as a national priority to ensure that a strong foundation for nation building is confirmed at an early stage. This realisation points to the need for young people to be masters of their own destiny. In other words, noting the diminished employment opportunities following the global economic environment, the youth of our society should aim to be entrepreneurs rather than becoming employees. This is especially critical since the economy currently does not, in reality, have the capacity to absorb the colossal annual influx of young people entering the job market after matriculating and graduating from higher education institutions.
To this end, there is a pressing need, now more than ever, to put in place structures that will provide entrepreneurial support to our young people and inculcate a culture of entrepreneurship in our youth so that instead of looking to others for employment, the youth creates employment for themselves and their communities.
Entrenched in the youth strategy are the following pillars: Enterprise Development, Employment Opportunities, Training and Skills Development, Information Dissemination and a Robust Institutional Framework. In line with these foundational pillars, it is envisaged that programmatic interventions aimed at streamlining and providing financial support for youth entrepreneurial initiatives will be initiated.
Concerted efforts will be invested in establishing programs that will foster a culture of entrepreneurship in youth from an early age to fortify the formal school curricula. Such programs will be designed to assist in enhancing the capacity and skill profile of young people and improve their access to information. The ultimate goal of these programmatic interventions is to facilitate young people’s entry into the job market at a later stage while also providing the platform required for them to develop sustainable businesses that provide employment for themselves and others.
The contribution of other stakeholders in the relevant organs of state as well as the private sector will be key in the success of this youth centred strategy; hence the motivation to strengthen existing partnerships and initiating networks that will make a positive contribution in this regard.
Our quest is to engender a youth that is economically empowered and able to bring about the societal reformation the country longs for. This is about young people that take ownership of their future in this country. A youth that is economically emancipated, capacitated, responsible and able to actively participate in the mainstream economy to become the cornerstone upon which the province builds a more prosperous and more inclusive economy. This we believe can be achieved through the successful implementation of the interventions identified in the strategy.
This is the vision of the YEES initiative and it is local government’s commitment to addressing the social hurdles that impede the development of our province, and indeed, our nation. Lastly, before we conclude, we want to stress that it is our belief that the youth of today, in spite of the challenges we have enumerated, have a confluence of opportunities to change their lives for the better. All we need is a change of mind set. For starters, we live in a world which has vastly changed over the past few decades. As we speak, we are witnessing a tectonic shift in the global economic landscape which has resulted in the developing world recording high levels of unprecedented growth while the established economies are struggling.
This shift in the global economic planet has resulted in Africa and Asia becoming the two fastest growing regions in the world. Over and above this, Africa is emerging as the new economic frontier so much so that in the next few years Africa is poised to be the force that drives the global economy. It is in these exciting times, brimming with many opportunities, that our young people live.
Over and above this, as young people you also live at the time when there has been ground-breaking technological innovations which have changed the face of the world and which have been pioneered by young people. Twitter, Facebook and Google come to mind. We also live during the times where knowledge economy is one of the dominant drivers of economic growth as opposed to the time when the world used to rely solely on the extraction and processing of natural resources.
This means that the nations that will dominate the world are those with people who are pushing the boundaries of innovation, understanding that there is no frontier to the quest for knowledge and invention.
It is because of this reason that we think we need a paradigm shift. Instead of young people who are paralysed by the spectre of unemployment, we need young people who will look at their situation differently that of looking at the opportunities presented by being freed from the burden of formal employment.
As we speak some of the greatest innovators today are young people who are also coining it. One of the young innovators that comes to mind is Nick D’Aloisio, who recently created an application called Summly and sold it to Yahoo for $30 million. Closer to home, Kelvin Doe from Sierra Leone taught himself engineering at the age of 13 and built his own radio station.
We have no doubt that in our midst here we have more of innovators like Nick D’Aloisio and Kelvin Doe. All we need to do is to change the way we think. As young people you have been given the canvass on which to draw the future of your dreams. In this regard we need young people who are visionaries and who are agents of change.
Programme Director, the world we are living in is beset by many challenges all which will give birth to a world that is unknown. We are not, for a moment, saying that the future of the world is bleak but it will be a height of folly to underestimate some of the challenges facing the world today.
We are talking here of the unrelenting rise in inequality levels, the fact that many countries have massive gross domestic product/ debt ratios which will burden future generations, the issues of global warming which have necessitated a shift from the fossil fuel to eco-friendly sources of energy, the fact that resources such as oil, which powers the global economy, and water are rapaciously being depleted, the fact that the current laissez-fair capitalism system has been proven unsustainable as evidenced by the 2008 global economic crisis. All of these challenges need young people who are imaginative, but more importantly who are activists for change.
The past generations might have invented the telephone, the steam engine, the computer, the aeroplane and sent a man to the moon to boot, but the future which you will inherit will be entirely different. It is a future for which you will need new coordinates to navigate. It is also a future that will be brimming with exciting and unexplored opportunities.
We would like to encourage the graduates, as they return back to their respective communities, to continue to be shining beacons of hope to those who follow in their footsteps and to not only take full advantage of the opportunities presented to them but be proactive in creating new possibilities for themselves and others.
I thank you.
