Abstract:
South Africa is a policy rich environment, with many excellent policies that accurately identify the challenges facing young people as they transition through school and towards work. However, young people still face significant challenges in this transition period. This paper reports on a policy review undertaken as part of the Basic Package of Support for Youth in South Africa project, which involved an assessment of existing policies and several consultations with various departments about how they support NEET youth. The policy assessment focuses on policies that pertain to the multidimensional needs of young people, including education, training, health, wellbeing, and employment. It does so in order to identify key policies and programmes that set out mandates to support young people who are not in employment, education and training. It provides the overarching policy context, identifies which departments have mandates to serve youth and what programmes exist, and reports which departments report a willingness to participate in developing a basic package of support for youth. The key finding is that there are a number of programmes that exist, but that young people continue to fall through the cracks because of a lack of policy coordination and integration. Based on this, the paper proposes an institutional framework to support a basic package of support for youth in South Africa.
Description:
This working paper is one in a series of reports and working papers by the project “Towards a Basic Package of Support for Young People who are not Employed, in Education or Training (NEET) in South Africa”. The BPS project, which commenced in November 2018 and runs until March 2020, explores the feasibility and design of a South African intervention to provide more comprehensive support to young people, aged 15 – 24 years, who are NEET.
Based on research and consultations, the project has put forward a detailed proposal for a programmatic intervention that can provide well-targeted, individualised and long-term support to young people in South Africa, while building a local community of practice to support both young people and the services and opportunities that exist for them. The proposal carefully sets out the various building blocks of such an intervention, founded in a review of best practices. It concludes with a proposal for a pilot that can be implemented at the local level across different South African municipalities. It also proposes an approach to develop an overarching, national institutional framework that can both ensure sufficient resource allocation and safeguard the quality, integrity and coherence of the intervention when rolled out at scale.
The project builds on earlier work, led by the Poverty & Inequality Initiative and the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit (SALDRU), both at the University of Cape Town, in partnership with a coalition of partners in government, academia and civil society, to conceptualise a more comprehensive approach to support South Africa’s youth.
The 2018 – 2020 phase is led by SALDRU and conducted in partnership with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) Africa; the Centre for Social Development in Africa (CSDA), University of Johannesburg; DG Murray Trust; and The Jobs Fund. The work was funded and provided with technical support by the Capacity Building Programme for Employment Promotion (CBPEP), funded by the European Union and based in the Government Technical Advisory Centre (GTAC) in the National Treasury.