Young People Navigating the Labour Market Issues facing young people in accessing the labour market

The Charters

The Charters place significant emphasis on the importance of supporting the development of enterprise initiatives, and in a number of charters the net profit after tax to be invested to drive these interventions is indicated. The BBBEE Code proposes to strengthen the relationship between enterprise and supplier development. This is coupled with the growing emphasis on the role of procurement in supporting these interventions – as highlighted in the Local Procurement Accord. These require of business that they employ procurement strategies that allow them to address the profile of their suppliers: the focus has been primarily been on changing the race profile of suppliers, but is increasingly on promoting local suppliers.

The Charters also have a number of requirements for business to undertake skills development: in many cases the Charters stipulate an amount, which is over the prescribed 1% skills levy and also suggest a matrix of programmes that can be supported with this investment. These regulations also specify target groups for this skills development, and in particular state that these programmes should be made available to black employees. Many of them also indicate that young people should be beneficiaries of these programmes.
Most of the charters recognise the need to address the socio-economic imperatives of the communities in which their workplaces are based. For example, the Forestry sector outlines the need to provide services and amenities to the rural poor: this includes the provision of housing for workers and their families, support to health and HIV/AIDS programmes, provision of community education facilities, environmental conservation programmes, community training in fire prevention and conservation, and support with rural road maintenance. Quite specifically the charter states that the industry is also aware of the important role of forests in providing livelihood opportunities for poor rural households and makes a commitment to ensuring regulated access to non-commercial forest products such as firewood, building poles, medicinal plants and edible fruits by local communities.

4. Other Legislation

The Skills Development legislation, including the Skills Development Levies Act and the associated regulations, has direct impact on youth employability in terms of creating access to meaningful skills development opportunities, particularly those linked to employability. The skills levy is set at 1% of payroll, and recent regulations increase the amount to be paid to business through discretionary grants, creating greater emphasis on occupational qualifications, rather than shorter skills programmes. All SETAs also have specific targets for creating skills development opportunities for young people, in terms of the National Skills Development Strategy III

The Employment Equity legislation focuses on the need to transform the profile of the employees within various sectors, which creates opportunities for young people: for example, in order to support employment equity within the accounting industry, a number of extended programmes have been developed to support young black men and women to access higher education, employment and then to register with the relevant professional body.

5. Funding initiatives to support these imperatives

   1. The Jobs Fund

Over and above funding from the fiscus for various youth employment initiatives, in 2010 the South African government established the Jobs Fund with the specific intent of finding innovative and sustainable ways of creating additional employment. The Jobs Fund is a Challenge Fund, offering to partner with institutions that have already committed funds to new interventions, and showing evidence of success. While 3 000 applications were received only 65 projects received support. Most applications presented projects which if funded could create jobs, but did not speak to innovative ways of leveraging significant job creation potential: that is creating significant opportunities for more jobs through systemic change.

The Jobs Fund aims to initiate its own processes of identifying original and potentially successful programmes. They have not focused specifically on the question of youth employment, and had assumed that this would be addressed through the work seeker or enterprise development funding windows. While two private sector initiatives which work to convince employers to identify job opportunities suitable for young people, and to commit to placing youth who have been screened and prepared, are being supported by the Fund, they acknowledge that there is a severe need to understand how large numbers of school leavers can be better prepared for the job market.
The Institutional Capacity Building funding window could potentially support institutions such as the Department of Labour Centres to re-configure their business processes to enable much higher levels of placement, based on the learnings from the two pilot projects.
The Fund also indicates that there is significant opportunity for further research into the real cost of youth not being economically active. This could review the costs of incarceration/diversion; social support; second chance education etc. There is an urgent need to quantify the private sector, public sector and individual benefits for young people being employed. Once established, this would serve as a benchmark that could inform funding models in the future. It would also form a useful framework for looking at the types of costs, which should be borne through public funding, corporate investment and individual contributions.

2. Corporate Social Investment

In addition to government funding imperatives, there is also substantive funding made available by companies through corporate social investment. These focus on a range of areas related to youth including, but not limited to: Support to and in schools (whole school development, learner support, teacher development etc); Support for FET Colleges (again this includes support for the college, as well as learners and practitioner development), Provision of bursaries; Supporting bridging programmes and academic and psycho-social support programmes for students in universities; Supporting placement into the workplace for new entrants through to the professions; as well as youth development programmes – including those that develop networks and leadership skills.

It was found that many of these corporate funders mobilise other private sector agents to invest in the expansion of delivery – where programmes are found to be successful – and also share their learnings with relevant parties (including social partners as well as government departments). Interviewees suggest that this enables interventions to increase substantially in scale and scope and offer useful learning for other stakeholders.

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