The government must increase monitoring to ensure that projects aimed at empowering youth deliver the desired results, the National Youth Development Agency (NYDA) said on Monday.
Young people made up the majority of the population, but were the most affected by unemployment and underdevelopment, despite the government’s commitments to include youth in skills development and job creation, the agency’s executive chairperson Andile Lungisa said in a statement.
Government empowerment policies aimed at youth often lacked costing, monitoring and accountability.
Skills development initiatives, including learnerships, had not been adequately monitored and evaluated, he said, and little information was available on the impact of private sector initiatives.
“In many instances we do not have empirical evidence on the rate at which these young people are absorbed into jobs,” he said.
Lungisa said the NYDA should be represented in all government clusters and in local government to monitor implementation of these programmes.
More needed to be done, and for this reason a National Youth Convention had been scheduled for August 5 to 7 in Kimberley. Lungisa said around 1 000 young people and government ministers were expected to attend.
The NYDA would implement several “anchor projects” over the next five years. These include projects in agro-processing, information and communications technology, motor vehicle and furniture manufacturing, mineral beneficiation, the green economy, non-military national youth service, and skills development programme Youth Build South Africa.
Lungisa said the NYDA had been able to approve R66.7-million worth of loans to young entrepreneurs, sourced business opportunities worth over R144-million, in the two years of its existence. It had sustained over 61 000 jobs, he said. — Sapa