Focus on Youth Unemployment

Focus on Youth Unemployment – do you have success stories to share?

A recent report released by STATS SA shows that unemployment is still one of the major and most persistent problems facing South Africa. This is despite the finding that less young people were living under the poverty line by the end of 2014. Stats SA is particularly concerned that the proportion of economically active youth seems to be on the decline with labour force participation rates among youth falling by 1.7% between 2009 and 2014. Two thirds of the total of South Africa’s around 5 million unemployed are young people between the ages of 15 and 34.

We are not benchmarking well either. The International Labour Organisation has found that our youth unemployment rate in South Africa sits at 52%, and this percentage is much higher than our SADC neighbours, almost four times the figure for sub-Saharan Africa according to Business Day Live. ‘We have more than double what might be termed our fair share of global youth unemployment’, they note.

This is indeed a picture that needs to be repainted.

The South African Draft National Youth Policy 2014 – 2019 speaks of internships, work-integrated learning opportunities, job fairs and road shows as solutions.

At IPM our focus is on serving people managers and leaders in business, to help the Human Resources Management Profession find workable solutions rather than dwell on what is not working and stop at that.

As HR, people managers and business leaders, what are we doing on the ground to make a difference to youth unemployment? Are you actively involved in programmes? What is your organisation’s commitment, and your personal commitment, to making a real difference?

Sharing and learning from our successes as a Professional Community is one way of tackling our challenges head on. And at IPM we have the mouthpiece to spread success stories that we can draw on for the future.

If you have examples of what’s working, at a very practical level, can you share them with us please?