It is my pleasure to be launching the Learning Cape Festival with my colleague Minister Dugmore.
This is a symbolic moment, of showing the linkages between learning and work - The Dept of Education is primarily responsible for initial learning and my department with the application of learning, but also its extension to employment and work, and the economy in general.
It is also a great pleasure for me to see the extent of involvement and participation in the Learning Cape Festival - the scope of membership to the Steering Committee, the stallholders, the learning icons, the guests and participants. Such voluntarism and co-operation indicates to me our capacity as a province to hold high ideals and values and to work towards achieving them, through appropriate activities as we celebrate the anniversary of the Freedom Charter.
This year my Department is releasing our first provincial Micro-Economic Development Strategy, the MEDS, and all the sector studies that we commissioned towards this end highlighted the constraints and needs for human resource development. We know that our province does relatively well when compared to other provinces. But, this is not a useful comparison - we must compare ourselves to our economic competitors - India, Brazil, regions and provinces in the developed world and South East Asia. When we do this, the picture changes dramatically.
We need to work with the Department of Education in building the foundations of learning in areas like learner take up and the achievements in language and mathematics at all levels, retention and throughput particularly from the Grade 10 drop-outs. Of major concern is that only 3% of black learners pass Mathematics on the Higher Grade.
The message that I want to get across to all learners - the unemployed, the underemployed, those who have never been employed - and I am drawing from the MEDS studies, is that those with skills and work experience are in an excellent position to find and keep good quality work.
For example, the clothing sector relied heavily on operators with about NQF level 1, the old standard 7. There are no longer opportunities at this skill level but there is a critical shortage of technologists and designers, these are high skill.
Similarly for other sectors.
In the Oil Gas sector, there is a critical shortage of artisans - welders, toolmakers, fabrication. The Call Center industry is a new industry and is attracting significant interest from foreign investors. Matriculants with good language skills and with a customer service orientation have an excellent opportunity for immediate employment. This sector offers good on-the-job training in language, IT and customer care skills - solid generic skills for lifelong learning.
Let me firm up my point by drawing on labour market analysis - 67% of unemployed people have NQF level 1 or less whereas 53% of employed people have NQF levels 2 to 5. Only 1% of graduates with Higher Education are unemployed, but about one quarter of Black graduates are unemployed! When I look at enrollments at Higher Education, by and large, black students enroll for courses that do not have significant opportunity in the labour market, and this goes back again to the primacy of initial learning, of the foundations - language, mathematics, life skills, learning to learn skills.
We are most fortunate to have good Higher Education and Further Education & Training Colleges in our province. We also have a number of SETAs (Sector Education & Training Authorities) with offices in our province - their mandate is to develop responsive training programmes, and in our province, this can draw on the strong culture of developing the trades.
Participation in the economy remains racially skewed, and learning and education has a critical role to overcome this legacy. Up to 80% of the Western Cape economy is comprised of small and medium sized companies where training and development requires special interventions in terms of skill requirement, mode of delivery and costs.
We have no doubt at all that we can only achieve our broad iKapa eLihlumayo goals by inserting learning along and with all our economic development activities. This Festival of Learning makes a significant step to bring together opportunities for work with the providers of learning, not only here at the CTICC but also in the 11 community sites the 10 workplace sites, and other partnership sites of the Festival.
My Department hands to the Premier, something that he has started, and we pass back to him, a Festival that is integrated into all our work in the province.
Thank you
Lynnette JohnsMedia Liaison Officer to Tasneem Essop
Provincial Minister: Environment, Planning and Economic Development
Tel: 021 483 3915 or 2769
Cell: 083 3100 113
