Africa is anti-youth. We are led to believe that the youth are the future of the continent, but the substantive evidence supports a different hypothesis.

I didn't celebrate Youth Day this year. I've come to realize that SA is not serious about the youth agenda.

...a thread

In SA, the youth are used as the political football of the political elite. Fallow, disengaged & disgruntled, they are weaponized to fight the battles of the corrupt and the greedy.

Consider the skills development & funding agencies that have existed over the past quarter-century.

The Umsobomvu Youth Fund was formed with an R400mln grant fund by government in 2001. Its mandate was skills development, youth entrepreneurship & training amongst others.

In its organizational life, it received well over R800mln yet the youth crisis still exists.

The National Youth Service was formed after the National Youth Commission Technical Team drafted the Green Paper on the NYS in 1998 & launched it in 2000.

Its mandate was to promote job creation & the development of skills among South Africans aged 18 to 35.

The attached problem statement drafted by the commission in 1998 helps you understand the main issues that the NYS was formed to address. These issues are just as prevalent today as they were 22years ago.

If you copy + paste on a business plan, you would hit the bullseye.

But the National Youth Services was given hundreds of millions in grants over many years.

What exactly did that agency achieve but for the securing of jobs for those that worked there?

The NYDA was formed after the amalgamation of the NYS with UYF.

Since its inception (according to their own website), the agency has sustained 5474 jobs & funded 1103 youth enterprises through grant funding.

But South Africa has a youth population of 17.8million as of June 2019 according to Stats SA.

Given the population of youth in SA, the % that are poor & marginalized, it goes with saying that the solutions are hardly making any material impact.

Youth in South Africa is the SINGLE LARGEST demographic according to StatsSA and yet the solutions aimed at addressing the issues facing youth seem grossly insufficient.

So apart from the remembrance of the heroic youth of 1976, what is there to celebrate?

This gross failure by the agencies of the state to ensure that youth have a decent education, economic opportunities, relevant training has created the need for many private entities to work in this space.

The irony is that those that bemoan the overwhelming & often disproportionate power of the private sector, are happy when the private sector or NGO sector picks up the glaring slack of the state.

Consider the work that has been done by Harambee which has supported a network of over 700,000 youth work-seekers & pathwayed young people into 160,000 jobs and work experiences (source: Harambee website).

This seems a mile ahead of the results of the state agencies.

YES, which launched less than 3 years ago, has registered 716 companies to-date & achieved 36 077 committed work experiences. I am not sure about the definition of these & how many are actually youth in full-time employment but the impact supersedes that of the state agencies.

Then you have Afrika Tikkun which was founded in 1994 & has reached 12 656 young people, placing 1895 of them in employment.

Then you have agencies like our NPO @MyGrowthFund which since 2016 has reached over 10,000 youth, delivered non-accredited educational programs to 1934 youth, and funded businesses that have created over 2,000 jobs. Most of those jobs are youth, poor & black.

It's not hard to see the point:

1. perhaps the youth & private sector are the better placed to create sustainable platforms to address the issues of youth.

2. perhaps the state should focus its attention on developing laws & leave implementation to NGOs & social entrepreneurs.

3. perhaps (when it comes to youth) we should rally around these ideas:

- smaller government agencies,
- fewer & more effective laws,
- more focus on policing & enforcement of regulations,
- less bureaucracy.

Kwande.

V|T