Inaugural Lecture on Youth Development “Deepening Youth Participation through Service”
Nelspruit
Programme Director,
Members of the Provincial Executive Council,
Members of the Provincial Legislature,
Honourable Mayors and Councillors,
The leadership of the Provincial Youth Commission and the
Provincial Youth Council,
Representatives of various youth organisations and structures
Representatives of business,
Civil society institutions
Distinguished Guests,
Compatriots and Comrades
I am highly honoured to be asked to inaugurate this annual
lecture series on youth development initiated by the South
African Youth Council in
For those of us whose daily preoccupation and discourse is primarily with regard to the delivery of services and programs that lead to the betterment of the lives of the majority, an invitation to deliver a lecture presents a dilemma. This dilemma derives from the imperative to ensure the appropriate balance between theory and practice in a manner that is educative without being irrelevant to the challenges of the day.
Whereas theory for its own sake is a worthless luxury we can ill-afford, practice that is not informed by proven theories, presents the danger of repeating mistakes that have been committed by others, either in other countries or in other eras in history. Unlike theories of the natural sciences, social theories cannot be tested in laboratories where the lives of people are not at stake.
As a country, we have clearly gone a long way in the development and implementation of good practices on youth development. Our National Youth Development Policy Framework and programs attest to this progress. This framework is based on an integrated and holistic approach to youth development. The development of the youth and their role in the development of society as a whole has become a global concern to a point where even the world-bank has titled its latest World Development Report ‘development and the next generation’. Both global and South African demographic trends suggest that any nation that seeks to be a nation of winners going forward has to invest heavily in its youth and do so now.
The World Development Report highlights the need for investing in the youth with unprecedented urgency. This urgency is derived largely from global demographic trends that include the fact that the world population is getting younger and younger. With the worldwide number of people aged between 12 and 24 years having reached 1.6 billion, the largest ever in history, the World Development Report views this more as an opportunity than a threat. This global population of youth is also reported to be the healthiest and most educated in history. These numbers include young people from both developed and developing countries. They face different opportunities for development and yet have to compete for the same space in the global village.
A young lady forced into prostitution in Mexico, a young man forced into civil war in Sierra Leone, and a young man with all the support systems to pursue a career in electronics and playing with all the available electronic gadgets in Vietnam, all have to compete for the same space, opportunities and resources that the global economy has to offer, notwithstanding their different opportunities for development. As adults, it is easy to tell who has a greater chance of constituting a nation of winners. In the highly globalised world that we all share, South African youth have to compete with their counterparts from developed and developing countries who in many cases are not only more educated but also much healthier.
While the need for an integrated and sustainable approach to
youth development is incontrovertible, tonight we would like to
focus more on the economic aspects of youth development.
We do so fully conscious of the fact that the economic
area of youth development is neither the only, nor necessarily
the most important arena of youth development.
Various studies on youth in
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Youth comprise the largest proportion of the unemployed.
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Within the youth group, young people with little education, women and rural youth are most affected by unemployment.
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Poverty is positively correlated to youth unemployment
Whereas the idea and reality of ‘youth unemployment’ has become a common refrain in the analysis of youth development issues, more rigorous analysis should go into the extent to which many of the unemployed youth are unemployable and more importantly, the likelihood that many should actually be still in training institutions or voluntary work, building the necessary capacity and habits to make them employable and entrepreneurial. The modern global economy demands advanced skills that go beyond mere literacy. Most of these skills can only be acquired by interacting with the real world of work on the foundation of a good education and training. The biggest challenge of policy is on the one hand how to build opportunities for youth to access work experience and at the same time build behaviours that reflect access to information, resources and experienced decision-making. This is the basis for setting the youth up for future success.
When we commemorated National Youth Day on June 16 we noted that
self-development through education is one the fundamental
opportunities presented by our democratic dispensation to young
people to pursue career goals that lead to self-development and
make them contribute to the growth of our country.
In the ever-changing world of constant technological
advancement, human capital improvement cannot be a once-off
event. Constant
learning and becomes a competitive advantage.
If indeed the single most important asset of the poor is
their labor, in developing countries such as
The State of Youth Report, emanating from the National Youth Commission, suggests that while self-employed youth constitute a small percentage of employed youth, most of the self-employed are in that position due to the failure to get formal employment. In other words, they enter the world of entrepreneurship from a position of huge disadvantage rather than strength.
It is in the above context that we need to implode a myth that appears to have gripped South African youth. This myth suggests that since indeed there is little correlation between academic achievement and entrepreneurial success, advanced skills are not necessary for the youth to go into business. This myth has resulted in a lot of young people jumping into the bandwagon of government tenders before they can even build the capacity for basic literacy and numeracy to do business, let alone understand and fill the tender documents. The result is a plethora of middlemen and women who are not graduating into real businesspeople.
The evidence from a number of developing countries suggests that interventions in youth development must occur early in the life cycle, with primary school education being the backbone of not only literacy and numeracy but also important habits for success. The tendency is for the pursuit of broader access to education to occur at the expense of quality, resulting in higher dropout rates and future unemployed youths.
Without a firm educational foundation, it becomes even more
onerous to build the capacity required by the modern economy.
Due to skill-intensive technical innovations, the global
economy which
Program Director, the fact that youth is a period of rapid change represents limited opportunities for holistic developmental interventions. Once such opportunities are missed, it becomes difficult to recover lost ground. It is for this reason that a life-cycle approach is generally viewed as preferable to youth development, treating young people as flowing from and into a series of stages.
It should be apparent from the above analysis that one of the most critical areas of intervention for youth development structures is the cooperation with education authorities to identify opportunities and threats to the development of critical foundational habits and skills as well advanced ones. Such cooperation must include the best delivery mechanisms and channels to achieve the outcomes that are competitive and relevant to the demands of a modern economy.
Human Capital development must be viewed as a broader socialization process that does not simply occur behind the desk. Without such cooperation most of our youth development initiatives may amount to expensive and ineffectual remedial efforts rather than less costly proactive and preventative plans.
Once again allow me to take this opportunity to thank you for honouring me to deliver this inaugural lecture. I wish the Youth Council a fruitful venture of this series of lectures and I hope future lectures will raise the bar even further.
I thank you.
Issued by: Office of the Premier,