South Africa’s Minister of Labour, Membathisi Mdladlana, said on Tuesday that skills-and-development programmes were critically important in meeting the Government’s aim of halving poverty and unemployment by 2014.
Speaking on the last day of the Imbizo Programme in Makhado near Thohoyandou in Limpopo, Mdladlana commended community-development initiatives in providing skills and creating jobs for local communities.
“Some of these projects started with a handful of people, and today they … accommodate people who otherwise would not have had the opportunity to make a living,” he said.
“Let this be a lesson to our detractors out there, that people like you are prepared to stand and be counted, in line with President Thabo Mbeki’s spirit of Vuk’uzenzele, by doing it for yourselves.”
The Minister emphasised the Government’s integrated approach for a sustainable skills-development and job-creation programme and urged small and medium entrepreneurs to take advantage of a range of support systems
offered by the Government and the private sector.
The Minister’s visit included a tour of government-funded skills-and-development programmes such as Makhuvha Women’s Bakery, the Tamisani Poultry Project and the Shatuwani Vegetable Garden & Dress-making Project. – I-Net Bridge