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,