Deputy Minister Manana,
Dr Mkwananzi, Chair of BHP Billiton,
Jonathan Goldberg of Global Business Solutions,
Professor Ihron Rensburg of the National Planning Commission,
Colleagues and friends.
Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this very high-powered panel. Thank you also to BHP Billiton for supporting this Summit, which brings together role-players from across our society to discuss the critical issues around training, jobs and the economy.
At the onset, it is fitting and appropriate to sharply raise the relationship between gender inequalities, gender based violence and lack of critical skills. According to the police crime statistics released in September 2011 on average seven women were murdered every day in South Africa.
At least half of these murders will have been at the hands of intimate partners, 89,56 cases of common assault against women, meaning 247 cases per day and 56,27 cases of rape meaning 154 a day were reported to the police. I am making reference to this social menace of our times mainly because women’s rights activists are beginning to make a direct link between poverty, lack of skills and failures to break a cycle of violence.
This ugly face of our democracy is a compelling case for ensuring that girls acquire quality education and women are skilled for radical economic inclusion, through enterprise development and leveraging on state policies for scaling up production and access to markets. Violence suppresses women’s goals and development and the country is deprived of the critical mass to grow the economy.
I have been asked to speak on the relationship between enterprise development and skills development.
Skills development is one of the priority outcomes identified by government - Outcome 5 - A skilled and capable workforce to support an inclusive growth path. Both the New Growth Path and the National Development Plan identify education and skills development as a fundamental prerequisite for increasingly equitable economic growth and inclusion, as well as for employment creation.
That does not, of course, mean that we can view education and training solely through the lens of the economy. Education in particular must build citizens as well as workers. Still, it remains critical that we also shape education and training to enable that our people can participate in the economy on an increasingly productive, equitable and competitive basis. Education and training provides a critical platform enabling our people, and especially our youth and women, to climb to a higher level in our economic as well as our social life.
Specifically, education and training have two major roles to play in the economy.
On the one hand, we need increasingly high level skills not only to meet immediate needs but also to enable our working people to adapt as the economy changes. If South Africa meets the targets for growth and diversification laid down in our planning documents, including the National Development Plan, the National Infrastructure Plan, the New Growth Path and IPAP, our people will need to be able to adapt to new skill needs. Moreover, the rapid changes in technology that characterise the global economy mean that every South African will need the basic education and training to learn to deal with new technologies as they emerge.
On the other hand, our education and training systems must do more to support a more equitable and inclusive economy. Education was used as a weapon before 1994 to suppress our people. It must now become a weapon for liberation and empowerment. We need to overcome the backlogs in investment in educational and training facilities in black communities. We need to expand our FET and HET systems so that they serve all our people adequately. We need to make sure that every young South African can get the quality basic education as well as the post- secondary education they need both to contribute to and to benefit from our growing economy.
One simple fact underscores the importance of education and training. While unemployment for African youth is over 50%, for African youth with a university degree it is only around 10%. True, unemployment overall is unacceptably high – but post-secondary education certainly helps.
Our approach to education and training has evolved over time since the breakthrough to democracy some 19 years ago.
Initially, we tended to focus on making the educational system more equitable while doing away with the more retrograde elements in the curriculum.
At the same time, in the economy, we confronted two core tasks:
- Identifying pressing skill shortages and finding ways to address them as best we could, and
- Supporting life-long learning for ordinary workers who had been denied their chance under apartheid.
In all these areas, we have made considerable progress, although much remains to be done. But we need now also to get away from the short-run focus on pressing skill needs to identifying how we can improve education and skills across the economy. We need qualitatively improved basic education, an expansion in higher education to meet international norms, and increased in-depth vocational training through the artisanship and FET systems. Only improvements in all three of these areas can equip our people to meet the changing needs of our developing economy. We cannot look just to quick fixes – we need to ensure that we increasingly strengthen and upgrade our educational systems.
Let me briefly outline some of our initiatives in this regard.
In July 2011, government and its social partners signed a National Skills Accord and a Basic Education Accord as part of our joint efforts to lay the foundations for more inclusive growth.
The Skills Accord sets out a number of joint commitments on training and skills development. Specifically, the parties pledged to work together:
- to expand the level of training using existing facilities more fully
- to make internship and placement opportunities available within workplaces.
- to set guidelines of ratios of trainees: artisans as well as across the technical vocations, in order to improve the level of training
- to improve the funding of training and the use of funds available for training and incentives on companies to train
- to set annual targets for training in state-owned enterprises,
- to improve SETA governance and financial management as well as stakeholder involvement
- to align training to the New Growth Path and improve Sector Skills Plans, and
- to improve the role and performance of FET Colleges.
To date significant progress has been made in reaching the targets set out in these commitments. Some examples of our successes include the following.
The parties to the National Skills Accord have increased their support for training substantially. In the 2012 financial year, over 21 000 people finished artisan training and 8650 completed, according to provisional data from 18 SETAs, the national trade testing centre Indlela, and four state-owned corporations (Eskom, Transnet, SAA and Denel). Since the signing of the Accord, about 15 000 students have been placed in companies, about one third of which were in the engineering field. Various State Owned Companies have started setting up state of the art workshops in FETs to help close the gaps between what these institutions produce and industry expectations.
Under the Basic Education Accord, state, private sector, union and community partners progressively adopt under performing schools for support. About 700 schools have been adopted by social partners and public officials by March 2013. These include large initiatives such as by Anglo Platinum and by the trade union, SACTWU.
The Youth Employment Accord, adopted in April this year, re-emphasises the importance of education and training, including internships and work placement, as agreed in the Basic Education and Skills Accords. It also commits government to providing support for a second-chance matric. We have begun to work on a business plan to provide facilities and support for young people to make this a meaningful opportunity.
Finally, let me turn briefly to the question of skills and enterprise development.
To start with, we need to get away from the generalities about training for entrepreneurship. The main blockages to enterprise development are the lack of appropriate market and financial institutions, access to affordable infrastructure, extension support and skills. Our people are highly entrepreneurial – virtually every study of poor people’s livelihoods shows that at some time or other they have started their own business. But without capital and appropriate serviced sites for businesses, without access to markets and productive skills, without logistics, they cannot succeed.
We need a more nuanced approach to skills development for emerging business. True, people need to understand basic accounting and how markets function. They need to have enough education to engage in the appropriate market place. But they also need specific productive skills, whether cooking or childcare, welding or car repair. And they need holistic support, preferably through incubators, to build their skills while addressing the other blockages to new enterprises.
These are issues with which we must engage at this important summit. We need to explore how we can work together to improve education and skills for productivity but also for equality and social mobility. In the long run, both of those aspects are critical for sustainable economic development and growth.
In conclusion, I would like to reiterate the importance of the role of industry partners in the skilling of our youthful society for the future. 70% of the resources (financial and technology), hubs for skills and enterprise development, are owned by the private sector. Our private sector partners have an equal obligation to invest hugely in development, not as good gesture, but as an investor attraction for growing the economy and for sustainable development.
The skills revolution we are calling for, compels progressive labour forces, to demonstrate their resolve to create jobs, fight poverty and to promote equity through skilling and scaling the production of new entrants.
Together we can do more.
