** *Strengthen Youth Development interventions: No to the Proposed Youth Wage* *
In this year’s State of the National Address (SoNA), President Zuma clearly articulated the trajectory to be traversed by the Republic as developmental rather than welfarist. President Zuma said, “Since we are building a developmental and not a welfare state, the social grants will be linked to economic activity and community development, to enable short-term beneficiaries to become self-supporting in the long run” The proposed Youth Wage bill suggests a fundamental policy miscommunication and forked tongue from the part of the State. This bill is anchored on the belief that; “where there is a problem, throw money”. It further throws the money to where it may not be required and thus thrusting our trajectory to a welfarist rather than a developmental. The bill as proposed, discounts a number of structural flaws within our society which affects youth employment. - Most fundamentally the bill assumes that our education system is designed and ran to effectively deliver employable young people en mass. - The bill simply over assumes that all young are unemployable and therefore nullifying some of the gains made by some youth in the workplace and education. - It presupposes that youth unemployment is a result of lack of resources to employ the youth and therefore suggests that funding private capital as a panacea to youth unemployment. - It further pays no attention to other youth development interventions (such as the National Youth Development Agency, Sector Education and Training Authorities, Development Finance Institutions, etc) which equally have an important role to play. Rather our focus should be on the consolidation of youth development interventions through: - Adequate funding of the NYDA in order for it to focus on its fundamental mandate (Youth Development). - Aligning of the National Youth Service (NYS) to the National Qualification Framework (NQF) thereby providing NYS participants with adequate exit opportunities. This will also allow participants to have a greater appreciation and utilisation of the NQF articulation. - Better coordinate the learnership interventions - Development Finance Institutions (DFI’s) need to adequately intervene in the development of young people. - Presidential business delegations need to be diversified to include youth, women and disabled people. The delegation should not be limited to the usual suspects but rather provide some young thriving entrepreneurs an opportunity to compete at the global stage. The revolutions that characterized the first quarter of this year throughout Africa have been largely communicated as caused by youth unemployment. Even if that was the case, our country needs to apply its mind further on youth unemployment (rather than fund private capital) especially in as far as policy proposals are concerned. Olwethu Sipuka has been tasked with heading the ANCYL Centurion Central Branch's policy issues towards the ANCYL Congress * _____________ Olwethu Sipuka Tel: 011 326 3282 Fax: 0866594816 -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. You don't have to put anything in the message part. All you have to do is to send an e-mail to this address (repeat): [email protected] .
