South Africa’s young people face a new kind of struggle in the democratic order. The country’s 16- to 30-year-olds find themselves living in times of contradiction. Some were not eligible to vote in the two democratic elections that ushered in a new era and now find themselves on the verge of adulthood and exposed to opportunities undreamed of by past generations.
Those who just made it to the polls in 1994 now find themselves, in their mid 20s, struggling to assert themselves by finding access to meaningful economic activity, either by holding down a decent, well- paying job or starting a business.
According to the 1996 census, there are 11, 9-million people between the ages of 16 and 30 years, just less than 30% of the population. These young people are faced with the challenge of obtaining higher education if their parents can afford it. Having attained a qualification, they have to find employment in an economy that has been shedding jobs.
The South African Graduate Development Association (Sagda) works closely with unemployed graduates. Phillemon Sello, social development desk manager for Sagda, acknowledges that opportunity is the greatest hindrance.
”Ideally, we would like to place [the graduates] in jobs. But lack of experience makes this difficult,” he says, adding that skills unsuited to requirements also prevent progress.
Sagda uses donor funding to place its 3 000 members in various projects. These range from an adult illiteracy alleviation project in the Fred Clark squatter camp near Pimville, Soweto, to offering tutorials in the Fontanas High School, also in Soweto.
Members are also placed in internship programmes, mainly with government departments. Sello says his organisation has found that graduates with accounting- and finance-related qualifications do not stay long in the database, neither do those with technical qualifications in the engineering field.
This is not surprising. More and more young people are entering the fashionable sectors of information technology and financial services and few go into mathematical and scientific fields. But sometimes holding down a job is not enough.
The job market they are now in is beset with uncertainty, with a constant possibility of being retrenched. That is probably why more and more young people take the challenging but ultimately rewarding route of starting their own business.
Thami Dlamini, programme director for the Emndeni Business Development Centre, notes that in harnessing entrepreneurs, ”we are not interested in numbers but impact”.
The centre trains business people from a programme developed by the International Labour Organisation and — through the Business Referral and Information network — helps aspiring entrepreneurs with drafting business plans, tendering and business counselling.
Dlamini is content with the average of 10 clients the centre sees a day, having trained 180 over the past three years. To gain access to economic opportunities, the youth need ”skills and information, as well as access to finance”. Money for the centre’s trainees is obtained through retail financial institutions such as Sizanani.
One entrepreneur who has seen a lot in five years is Victor Mazibuko from Kwa-Thema in the East Rand. Five years ago, as a student at Rand Afrikaans University, he was startled when a lecturer left to start his own business in Cape Town.
”This sparked me to wonder what we as young people can do,” he recalls. He quit his studies at the end of 1996.
Starting as a part-time sweet vendor, he also worked as a gardener in his neighborhood. From these humble beginnings, he established a dry cleaning depot, and then a public-phone outlet that has evolved into a fully-fledged communications service (which now has an Internet cafÃ