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Minister of Labour, Membathisi Mdladlana, says he is confident that the Sector Education and Training Authorities (Seta) will meet the learnership intake target of 72 000 young, unemployed learners as agreed at the 2002 Growth and Development Summit.

Addressing the Seta CEO Forum meeting in Woodmead, Johannesburg, today Minister Mdladlana said there has been a marked improvement in the learnership implementation and he was optimistic that the 72 000 learnerships target would be met by the May 2004 deadline.

"According to our preliminary Quarterly Monitoring Report up to the end of September 2003, I have noticed a significant improvement in terms of participation levels by young people below the age of 30 in learnerships. There are a total of 45 898 young people in various learnership programmes," the Minister said.

"On these figures we still need about 27 000 learners between now and May to meet our target for May and of course an additional 8 000 on top to reach the 80 000 by March next year," he said.

But the Minister hastened to warn against complacency and called on Seta's to remain more determined particularly in the light of the growing number of unemployed school leavers who are unable to pursue higher-level education.

"We have seen a significant improvement in the matriculation pass and we know that relatively few young people will get opportunities to participate in full-time higher education full-time. It is for this reason that I urge you to double your effort to exceed the target," the Minister said.

Minister Mdladlana also noted that the skills development strategy has been embraced countrywide and that a number of support initiatives were continually been developed in various provinces to accelerate learner ship implementation.

These initiatives include:
* Siyaya Learnership project in KwaZulu-Natal to offer structured learning to 1 000 unemployed graduates.
* Ethekwini Municipality Learnership programme - to accommodate 5 000 matriculants.
* The recently registered Community Worker Learnership - to accommodate 2 840 learners.

He said government as an employer was also leading by example by appointing young unemployed people on learnerships in various departments.

"There are other learnership programmes with the Department of Public Works where in 500 contractor learnerships are to be employed by the end of January 2004," the Minister said.

He said an additional 11 00 learners were envisaged to be trained from March as part of the Employment Development Lead Employer pilot project. This project is a precursor to the Employment Skills Development Agency (Esda) to assist small business in learnership implementation.

The Minister said Esdas are to be formalized later this year.

Enquiries: Snuki Zikalala at 082 809 3195.

Issued by: Department of Labour
22 January 2004