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The government has identified a number of challenges that continue to contribute to the high unemployment rate among South Africa’s youth.
In a recent parliamentary question and answer session, Labor and Employment Minister Thulas Nxesi said that key issues include:
- The structural nature of the South African economy;
- Low levels of economic growth aggravated by insufficient investment by the public and private sectors in new companies and infrastructure;
- Socio-economic challenges and high levels of poverty that persist among blacks and, in some cases, contribute to school dropouts, especially in rural and peri-urban areas;
- Limited skills acquisition and resulting inadequate preparation of young people to enter the world of work;
- Rapid changes in the labor market driven by digitization and automation.
Nxesi said that the Covid-19 pandemic has added to the previous challenges.
“Within the government, great strides have been made in improving the employability of young people through interventions in the education system, but much remains to be done. The government has also implemented a series of interventions to tackle the problem of youth unemployment, ”he said.
Some of the initiatives that have been introduced in the Department of Employment and Labor include;
- The Employment Services Enactment Act 2014 was introduced to guide the Department in its free services to promote youth employment. These services include the registration of job seekers and job opportunities, matching, counseling, placement offered through 126 job centers, visiting points and satellite; and employment schemes for vulnerable groups through 13 factories of supported employment companies and subsidized organizations that employ people with disabilities;
- Labor Activation Programs financed by the Unemployment Insurance Fund;
- Professional dependents due to death Scholarship program for young people financed by the Compensation Fund.
Unemployment in South Africa
The last Quarterly Labor Force Survey For the three months through March 2020, it revealed that the country’s unemployment rate increased by one percentage point to 30.1% in the first quarter of 2020.
These data do not include the coronavirus lockdown period and the country’s unemployment rate is expected to have risen significantly in the second quarter of 2020.
The number of employed persons decreased by 38,000 to 16.4 million and the number of unemployed increased by 344,000 to 7.1 million in the first quarter of 2020 compared to the fourth quarter of 2019, which translates into a 306,000 increase in the workforce.
The percentage of young people between the ages of 15 and 24 who were unemployed, neither studying nor training (NEETs) increased from 33.2% in the first quarter of 2019 to 34.1% in the first quarter of 2020.
In this age group, the NEET rate for both men and women increased by 0.8 percentage points. The NEET rate for women was higher than their male counterparts in both years.
Compared to the first quarter of 2019, the percentage of young people aged 15 to 34 who were not NEETs increased by 1.1 percentage points, from 40.7% to 41.7% in the first quarter of 2020.
The NEET rate for men increased by one percentage point, while for women, the rate increased by 1.1 percentage points in the first quarter of 2020. In both the first quarter of 2019 and the first quarter of 2020, more than four in ten young women were without employment, education or training. .
Read: South Africa’s Biggest ‘Transformation’ Law Coming – Here Are The Planned Changes You Should Know About
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