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18 September 2008

Recent reports in the media following the presentation of the Joint Initiative on Priority Skills Acquisition (Jipsa) to the Portfolio Committee on Labour may have caused confusion about current and future plans for Jipsa and the Human Resource Development Strategy. The Office of the Deputy President would like to clarity the following points.

1. That Jipsa continues to operate and has the full support of the South African Government, the Jipsa Joint Task Team and the key social partners such as the business sector, organised labour and the academic community. It has also secured funding for its secretariat by the Business Trust until the end of March 2010.

2. Jipsa was initiated as an urgent and short term response to the skills needs in the country. It is important to institutionalise some of the key lessons learnt. It is also a sign of the success of Jipsa that it will be incorporated into a more permanent and comprehensive national human resource development strategy.

3. Cabinet has agreed that the Minister of Education should shortly release draft plans for a Human Resource Development Strategy, for public consultation. The Jipsa stakeholders and project owners will provide valued and informed input into this process.

4. If public consultations result in an approach that is sufficiently agreeable to all parties including Cabinet, it is hoped that the HRDS-SA will be launched next year.

5. It is expected that many of the successful elements of Jipsa will be incorporated into the HRDS-SA, including stakeholder involvement at the top level.

6. Following the initiation of the HRDS-SA, the Jipsa secretariat will operate parallel to HRDS-SA for about a year, and will wind down its activities when its stakeholders are satisfied with the capacity of the HRDS-SA to carry out all the relevant activities that Jipsa has been responsible for.

7. Jipsa has been successful, promoting several strong interventions to ensure that the shortage is less severe than it would have been. Jipsa has prioritised the skills development process, has mobilised and aligned the efforts of major public and private sector role players behind mutually agreed priorities and has unblocked various obstacles to speeding up skills acquisition.

8. Jipsa has operated for two-and-a-half years, because its stakeholders, being CEOs, chairs of companies, trade union federation leaders, government ministers, the Deputy President, professional bodies and education sector leaders continue to agree that the intervention is working well.

The government has full confidence that the Jipsa mandate will be delivered by all the key stakeholders and the Jipsa structures such as the Joint Task Team, the Technical Working Group and the Secretariat.

For more information please contact:
Denzil Taylor
Spokesperson to the Deputy President
Cell: 082 561 3772

Issued by: The Presidency
18 September 2008