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The Minister of Labour told a Pretoria media briefing earlier today that he is extremely confident that the commitments made at the Growth and Development Summit (GDS) regarding skills development would be met.

Business, labour, community and government committed themselves to ensuring that 72 000 young people would be placed in learnerships by May 2004.

Minister Mdladlana said that government - excluding departments such as Health, who already have large-scale learnership commitments in terms of their line functions - would have 10 000 learners in place by the deadline, adding that the Department of Labour would take on board 1 000 learners.

"As you are aware, I am placing considerable pressure on the Sectoral Education and Training Authorities to ensure that they meet the objectives for which they were created; I do not want participants in the GDS to fail to meet the commitments they made," the Minister said.

The Minister said that many large employers, such as parastatals including Eskom and Transnet, had also made significant commitments to the achievement of learnership targets.

There are already 37 797 learners engaged in learnership programmes - programmes which did not exist prior to 2000 and 10 872 apprentices are also funded by SETAs. More than one in five of all workers in the labour market have received structured learning under the Skills Development Strategy.

"A skills development priority is the training people not only to be effective in the workplace, but also to train them to become employers so as to boost job creation," the Ministers aid.

The Minister emphasised the importance of skills development in terms of the achievement of employment equity, saying employers no longer have the excuse of there being no suitable black candidates, as this legislation empowers them to skill candidates from designated groups.

"It is also important that the synergies between provincial and national skills programmes are exploited to the full, so as to ensure that all - whether in private or public sector - are on the same road, to the same destination," the Minister said.

The Minister also informed the media that 24 SETAs had submitted their annual reports to parliament and only two - the Police, Security, Legal, and Correctional Services SETA and Secondary Agriculture Training Authority - had any audit qualifications and they will have to appear before the Standing Committee on Public Finance or Scopa.

The Tourism and Hospitality Seta report was not tabled. The Auditor-General had rejected their financial statement.

"It is encouraging, because this represents an improvement. Last year six of the SETAs had audit qualifications," the Minister added.

Enquiries: Snuki Zikalala, 082 809 3195

Issued by: The Department of Labour, 12 September 2003