RAVI NAIDOO: Enable our youth to be the agents of change

Every youth job created uplifts a family and a community in some way.

SA’s youth will have to save themselves. The government has failed to play its part so far in creating a conducive environment, while private sector, which should be the jobs engine for the country, has had to contend with a decade of little to no economic growth, and is as likely to shed jobs as create them.

So, this Youth Month we need a bit less celebration and a whole lot more introspection as we take stock of what needs to happen to create a better future for our youth.

There are no prizes for guessing that education is the ultimate, long-term ingredient for societal change. However, after three decades of democracy we find that our education system still isn’t working for the majority of our children. In 2021, our grade 4 pupils had the worst reading ability in the world, with 81% incapable of reading for meaning.

The economy is supposed to come to the rescue. Instead, due to failing infrastructure and business confidence we are projected to achieve 0.1% growth this year and unemployment has steadily risen to 32.7%. Right now 4.8-million young people are jobless. That creates underlying social instability, which is bad for economic growth.

While efforts must be made to turn around education and the economy (neither is impossible to fix with the right policy choices), there is a presidency-led national network of youth-focused institutions that seek to collectively enhance pathways for youth employment.

The Youth Employment Service (YES) is a private sector contributor to that national effort. This Youth Month YES celebrates the creation of more than 113,000 youth jobs since 2019, having paid R6.3bn in youth salaries, with all of them fully funded by the private sector. We provided salaries to 32,578 youths last year alone.

Our focus is to enable talented young people from disadvantaged households to become the next generation of professionals and entrepreneurs, and who will not just develop their own careers but, one hopes, go on to develop their communities and SA.

With its focus on monitoring and evaluation, YES has been conducting the biggest youth survey in the country. We survey about 38,000 youths every quarter to help us understand how to better curate successful programmes that ensure they develop successful careers.

The survey shows that 42% of YES alumni are employed, and three-quarters had found employment within six months of leaving the programme. Critically, the research shows that the top sectors employing young people are finance, creative, mining, and digital.

Thousands of YES youths are being placed in future-facing positions such as data capturers, business process outsourcing roles, cybersecurity agents, digital artisans, drone pilots, content creators and software developers. Many of them will become professionals in these sectors and help SA emerge as a leading nation in an age of technology.

One of these young people, YES alumnus Sabelo Thabethe, took part in the Ziao Coding Bootcamp through the Yes programme. That inspired him to launch a fintech start-up, Zaka Manager, an app aimed at helping people understand personal spending and transactional behaviour. The programme gave him the confidence, technical expertise and entrepreneurial skills he needed to kick-start his business.

Also critical is the need to support and expand the informal economy and small businesses. While township economies are largely informal, they’re also far bigger than many people realise. Starting a micro-business can be the first step to getting into the mainstream economy.

Currently, 15% of all YES youths are engaging in “side hustles” over and above their day jobs, which is almost double the national average of 7%. If we cut red tape and offer more support there could be an explosion of jobs in small businesses.

Another YES alumnus, Thobani May, used the skills he gained to start Eco Char, which uses alien trees in his community to make charcoal. The business already employs five people from the community.

The effects of creating youth jobs ripple more broadly than we realise. About 62% of all YES youths have children or family that depend on them financially — the median number of dependents per YES youth is two, and more than 60% come from grant recipient households. Every youth job we can create today uplifts a family and a community in some way.

It is more important now than ever to create opportunities for young people  who have the potential to forge successful careers and businesses, and fill the socio-economic gaps in communities. For SA’s youth, Alice Walker’s aphorism, “we are the ones we have been waiting for”, will most likely ring true.

• Naidoo is CEO of the Youth Employment Service (YES).