23 Mar 2014

Trade unions from across the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region met on March 19 under the auspices of the Southern African Trade Unions Coordination Council (SATUCC) to discuss problems of youth unemployment in the region.

When officially opening the seminar, deputy permanent secretary in the Ministry of Labor and Home Affairs, Ms Kelebogile Kgabi said despite the fact that employment played a critical role in improving the welfare of the majority of the population, unemployment and underemployment rates remained high in the region.

She said all SADC countries recorded double digit unemployment rates for women. However, said Ms Kgabi, the greatest challenge facing SADC countries was youth unemployment, which was roughly twice as much as adult unemployment rates in most countries.  “The youth aged 15–34 years constituted 35per cent of an estimated population of 274 million.

This poses opportunities as well as challenges for the region,” she said. She added that one structural driver of youth unemployment in the SADC region was rural–urban migration, which was largely a youth phenomenon across the region.

She explained that the youth often migrated to urban areas to escape drudgery associated with rural life, poverty and limited employment opportunities in rural areas.

However, she said, some migrants did not easily find jobs and ended up joining queues of unemployed youth in the informal sector. Ms Kgabi said the government of Botswana had taken a holistic and multisectoral approach to the employment challenge and established a wide range of policies and programmes aimed at reducing unemployment among the youth.

For his part, SATUCC president Mr Gadzani Mhotsha said getting young people into jobs had become a critical challenge that required robust policy response at both national and regional levels.

He said SADC Ministers of Labor had directed the SADC secretariat to develop a SADC youth employment promotion policy and strategic plan that would also take into account related on-going work being done by other SADC desks.

e said the past draft sought to ensure that the youth in SADC were offered secure, decent and productive employment to achieve social and economic inclusion.

“This seminar therefore poses the right moment to discuss youth unemployment in the SADC region towards providing further consolidated inputs,” said Mr Mhotsha.

Trade Unions from across Southern Africa gathered for a regional preparatory seminar ahead of the SADC ministers of employment meeting scheduled for Malawi as well as the African Union Labor and Social Affairs Commission to be held in Windhoek next month.

The meeting was therefore meant to appraise the regional and national trade union leadership on the processes and contents of the draft SADC youth employment promotion policy and strategic plan, and to draft the SADC labor migration policy.

They were also meeting to consolidate collective trade union positions towards Draft SADC Youth Employment Promotion Policy and strategic plan. ENDS