YES, CHIETA to tackle youth unemployment together

ARTICLE BY: Creamer Media Reporter

PUBLICATION: Engineering News

YES works with the private sector to help place thousands of talented but unemployed youth into quality work experiences. These include placements into various high-impact sectors like global business services, creative, conservation, healthcare, agriculture and processing, education, digital and early childhood development, with no government funding. CHIETA’s mandate is to facilitate skills development, education, and training in the chemical industry.

Together, the two bodies will focus on maximising the employability of graduates in four main ways: collaborating on skills development and training; creating youth development programmes through CHIETA’s Smart Skills Centres and YES’s Hubs; exploring further co-funding opportunities through the private sector; and developing entrepreneurship and small business funding options for unemployed youth.

Yershen Pillay, the CEO of CHIETA, said the partnership was part of a strategy to drive greater cross-sector collaboration to help close South Africa’s skills gap and make a dent on the country’s youth unemployment crisis.

“As a country, we must move with speed to create jobs. For us, a key focus is on training for impact, so the people we train are absorbed into full-time employment. This partnership with YES in an important public-private partnership that will increase the number of youth getting work experience, while supporting SMME development as a way to support the industry to create jobs,” said Pillay.

Ravi Naidoo, the CEO of YES, said the partnership provided ‘significant synergies’ between the two different stakeholders in the broader drive to increase youth employment levels.

“One of the most important foundations for our country’s future is the youth – and the biggest endowment we can give them is skills, training and experience. To achieve this, it will take unprecedented levels of collaboration across the private and public sectors to solve the joblessness crisis,” said Naidoo.

“What makes this partnership important to YES is that both institutions want to make an impact, go outside the box, and create new boxes to fight this unemployment crisis. Critically, it will contribute to creating jobs that have a multiplier effect down the line: we must find ways to turn one job into ten, or more.”