Youth skills programme 'optimistic'
 

Youth skills programme 'optimistic' ILHAM RAWOOT - May 09 2011 13:34

Questions are being asked about the usefulness of a R500-million youth development programme being launched.

The aim of the National Rural Youth Services Corps (Narysec), an initiative of the department of rural development and land reform, is to develop skills among 18- to 35-year-olds in rural areas. But what these skills actually are is yet to be revealed.

David Neves, poverty researcher at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (Plaas), says: "The term 'skills development' is extremely unclear." According to the department's press release "the objective of Narysec is to recruit and develop youth in rural areas … to be paraprofessionals [trained workers who assist professionals] who will provide community service in their communities.

The programme is expected to create about 10 000 opportunities for at least four youths from [each of] the 3 000 rural wards in the country … Skills development will include discipline, patriotism, life skills, rights awareness and specific skills areas, empowering youth to change [their] rural areas." Successful candidates will receive a monthly stipend of R1 320 while undergoing two years of training in skills identified during their induction.

"The critical issue is what are the skills that are going to be imparted," says Kate Philip, technical support provider to the Community Work Programme, a similar project run on a much larger scale.

"A lot also depends on the calibre of training. We don't know at this point how these people are going to be supervised and the kind of support they're going to get."

Neves says there is a gap around "hard skills" and the entry points into the labour market for both formal employment and informal self-employment. "What is required are technical skills -- things like carpentry, animal husbandry and agricultural skills. What on earth do they mean by two years of patriotism, discipline and rights awareness?

"People can be quite critical of life skills-based training. People have specific needs, like how to cure certain illnesses or how to use a specific type of sewing machine," Neves says.

"This seems to be underpinned by a large dose of optimism. It concerns me that the phrases used are all things that are fairly intangible. Also, when the trainees are called paraprofessionals, who are they auxiliary to? Who are the professionals in this domain, or are they going to be left in an organisational no man's land?"