Rising youth unemployment was reason for concern‚ while the decline in skilled workers showed that the direction government had taken in terms of skills development may have flaws‚ Deputy Minister in the Presidency‚ Buti Manamela said.

In response to a report from Statistician-General Pali Lehohla on the morbidity and mortality patterns amongst the youth of South Africa‚ released on June 29‚ Manamela said on Wednesday there was a relationship between youth unemployment and various other problems in society.

He said that two years ago various social actors had signed the Youth Employment Accord‚ and now “we need to come out and say what has been the impact”. It was clear that more needed to be done in terms of focusing on dealing with youth unemployment.

There had been five key interventions that came from the Presidential Working Group on Youth‚ and government would ensure that these were all implemented.

“Some of the interventions have already been launched as part of the youth month programmes‚ and some of them we will be launching in the not so distant future.”

The one‚ he said‚ being to support and encourage young people to be entrepreneurs because‚ “the rush for creation of jobs may not have necessarily yielded the result that we wanted”.

“We have also seen that over the last few years there have been more jobs yielded from interventions in youth enterprises – in fact small businesses have contributed more than 40% of the country’s employment rate.”

That was why government had launched the mentorship programme with the Mara Foundation‚ while a platform for funding of those youth enterprises to the tune of R2.7-billion‚ which will support youth owned small businesses‚ had been created with the Industrial Development Corporation‚ the National Youth Development Agency and the Small Enterprise Finance Agency.

One of the main causes of small businesses not succeeding was because government did not pay them on time‚ he said. A unit had been set-up in the Presidency that would focus specifically on ensuring that small businesses were paid on time.

In the next two years‚ with support from the Department of Higher Education‚ the Cooperatives Institute would be created as a way of intervening and encouraging young people to enter into small businesses and encouraging innovation amongst young people.

“We believe that we can in the next few years mentor‚ create and encourage at least one million young entrepreneurs‚” said Manamela.

The national youth skills intervention would also be launched and would specifically target young people between the ages of 19 and 24‚ as government believed this was where the big problem was in terms of where young people were not economically active.

“There is a task team that has been set up to look at a framework on National Youth Service (NYS).

“We do not think that NYS should be equal to getting young people in the military. Yes there are certain values that young people need to learn but a successful NYS programme must be one that imparts skills on short term and long term so that they are able to be employed through public service programmes or create their own small businesses.”