Deputy Chairperson, I'm answering question 192 by hon Ncitha. This morning, hon Ncitha and members, I was in the Cabinet committee meeting tabling the integrated and the comprehensive youth employment strategy.
You see, Chairperson, one of the challenges that we're battling against is also or is the silo operation that you find in the public service. Spheres of government, departments, entities, have fenced themselves in their territories in such a manner that even ... that defeats the whole objectives that they want to achieve. And I think
we are lucky to have President Ramaphosa who is working with us; who is working with all of us breaking these walls that are detrimental to the effective service delivery.
And you would remember in his June 2019 state of the nation address, the President outlined clear deliverables including an integrated and a comprehensive youth employment strategy. In particular, he emphasised the implementation of the comprehensive plan that would be driven and co- ordinated from the presidency to ensure we strengthen partnership, co- ordination and co-operation across government, even with the private sector.
What I was tabling this morning in the Cabinet committee was a document on how we see what the President stated in the state of the nation address unfolding in an impactful manner.
So, we Employment and Labour Department as the co-ordinating department for all the interventions of employment across all the departments and sectors. We believe that we must, at the centre of building a national pathway management network for young workers to view and access available learning and work opportunities and receive a range of support services; and of course work readiness
training to help them navigate into the employment and the economic opportunities.
We are rolling our sleeves in revitalizing the national youth services in order to create opportunities for the young people, to visibly and meaningfully contribute to the community, develop critical skills required to participate effectively in the economy, build confidence and expand their network and social capital.
We have, however, taken note of the amount of existing information and contribution of the various stakeholders on addressing the youth employment. There are a number of initiatives; hence we are saying the issue of co-ordination is central.
As a department we have further started a review process of all our training programmes and we need to ensure that any training programmes are able to ensure that beneficiaries are more competitive in the labour matter. We raising this matter of reviewing training programmes because there are people who just apply to the sector education and training authorities, Setas, or wherever there's money; get millions, come up with a training programme, three months after that those poor kids are left in the
ledge, they have nothing to show, nothing to offer after that particular training.
We must talk about qualitative programmes. We are working to connect the young people with employment opportunities through amongst others, free work seeker recruitment and placement through the public employment services youth centres and private employment services careers, the career counselling, employment scheme for work readiness, promotion programmes and providing young people with the experience through the learnerships, and we are also doing promotion of the youth entrepreneurship, youth cooperatives and the Small, Medium and Micro-sized Enterprises, SMMEs, collaborate effort between the public and the private sector to expand the intake of the young people through the initiatives such as the Yes Programme, the Harambee, Tshepo 1 Million, employer tax initiative and other inventions funded under the Jobs Fund and the Unemployment Insurance Fund, UIF, and even the Compensation Fund.
But as I'm saying, we want to emphasise this time around that, these are qualitative programmes.