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Fin24 reports that when President Cyril Ramaphosa launched The Youth Employment Services (YES) programme in March 2018, it was supposed to create one million jobs for unemployed youth per year for three years.
Four years later, the YES programme has only created 82,207 work opportunities for young people. And only around 30% to 35% of those opportunities were converted to full-time or permanent employment, said the Yes4Youth non-executive director, Cas Coovadia, on Tuesday. Coovadia, also the CEO of Business Unity SA and the chairperson of the National Business Initiative, addressed the key shortcomings and learnings from the Yes4Youth initiative at the PSG Think Big Series. While he admitted that the jobs that the initiative had created were a "drop in the ocean" of what was promised, he said that the 1-million target had been too ambitious to begin with. "When we started looking at this, it became quite clear that we couldn't create a million jobs a year. Not because of lack of effort but because the environment just wasn't there for us to do so … The sort of targets we set for it were quite honestly unrealistic," he said. He added that when those promises were made, they were not informed by any research. It was just a "hype", especially because there was also a mismatch in skills mass-produced by SA universities and the new jobs that the fourth industrial revolution demanded. About 70% of the 82,207 employment opportunities that the programme managed to create came from manufacturing, information and communication, the financial industry, other services, motor vehicle repairs and the wholesale and retail sectors. Coovadia said there was still a lot of work to do in the mining and quarrying sector, health and social work, and power and gas industries.
- Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Londiwe Buthelezi at Fin24
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