adminABOUT 240,000 new jobs were created for young people in the last 12 months, but this was not yet at the scale required to cater for the 500,000 young entrants coming into the labour market, South African Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa said yesterday. Ramaphosa was replying in writing to a question in Parliament by Democratic Alliance leader Mmusi Maimane.
He noted that the Presidential Infrastructure Coordinating Commission, which oversees government’s major infrastructure projects, was tracking jobs on about 40 infrastructure projects that currently employed an estimated 95,000 young workers.
Ramaphosa gave details of the progress made in creating jobs for youth by the National Skills Fund, the Jobs Fund, the Expanded Public Works Programme, the maritime skills development project, the technical and vocational education and training (TVET) college infrastructure project, the national rural youth service corps programme, and small business development and entrepreneurship programmes.
The National Skills Fund run by the Department of Higher Education and Training had to date provided R431m to Denel, South African Airways Technical, Eskom and Transnet for apprenticeship training that had benefited 2,583 individuals around the country.
The NSF had also provided funding of R94m for maritime skills development, which had so far benefited 420 people.
The Jobs Fund, which leverages off existing capacity in the public and private sector through co-financing projects, had supported about 40,259 permanent jobs in 2014-15. In addition, about 46,348 people received training over this period.
The fund offers one-off grants in the areas of enterprise development, infrastructure, support for work seekers and institutional capacity building.
The Expanded Public Works Programme, which aims to create six-million work opportunities by March 31,2019, created 1,103,983 work opportunities in the 2014-15 financial year. Of these, 563,031 were taken up by the youth.
The TVET Infrastructure Programme entails the building of 12 new campuses and the refurbishment of two existing campuses. The new campuses are evenly spread across the Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo and Mpumalanga. The total funding for the programme is R2.5bn.
The National Rural Youth Service Corps project aims to recruit and develop youth aged 18-35 years to be trained as paraprofessionals (people who work alongside professionals) in the rural areas.
Ramaphosa said the Department of Small Business Development had also undertaken several initiatives to reduce poverty and to create opportunities for poor and marginalised individuals to start earning decent incomes through jobs or self-employment.
The Department of Economic Development had worked with the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) and its subsidiaries to provide funding for young entrepreneurs. The IDC had approved R144m for youth-led investment projects in the past 12 months.
In the same period, the Small Enterprise Finance Agency disbursed R310m to youth-owned businesses. — bdlive.
Bongani Ndlovu