Skills, workplace programmes key to youth employment
A study has found that youth employability programmes are effective in increasing the likelihood of employment among the youth.
This comes amid growing calls for the government to address the high rate of unemployment.
According to a director at the Centre for Social Development in Africa, Lauren Graham, these programmes offer a combination of technical skills training and workplace readiness training.
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"What we find is that over time, we see an improvement in their employment chances and when we compare the sample that we tracked with a similar sample in the quarterly labour force survey data.”
Graham adds: "What these programs often do is they almost stand in for the lack of social capital that many young people have when they're looking for work. So they play a very important inter-mediation service in that they bring young work seekers closer to employers."
Last year President Cyril Ramaphosa launched the Youth Employment Service (YES) programme as a means of creating work experience opportunities for young people who have been unable to find jobs.