WeeklySA_AdminEMERGING: Educational institutions move to make a difference to youth unemployment
By WSAM Reporter
Regent Business School recently sponsored 10 newly qualified beauticians to complete a six-week business course to get them up to speed on the business side of running a small-to-medium enterprise.
The training was conducted under auspices of the Regent Enterprise Development Hub, an entrepreneurial and innovation programme aimed at supporting small business development. The hub provides small business owners and entrepreneurs with mentorship, help in accessing finance and business training.
Hoosen Essof, operations manager at Regent Business School, said the college took people who have completed technical training, as with the newly qualified beauticians, to give them business know-how to start their own business and employ people.
“This is exactly where the power of SMMEs comes in – not in someone creating an income for just themselves as a one-person operation, but as the slowly emerging green shoots of an enterprise that will eventually create employment.
“The combination of redHUB’s practical and business-centric training approach and the support we receive from our academics at Regent Business School ensures that the programme we deliver is current and relevant. Entrepreneurs are ‘do now’ people by nature and our just-in-time training caters to that,” said Essof.
Essof said there was little doubt that South Africa’s organisations could play a pivotal role in addressing our youth unemployment crisis, through programmes aimed at giving young people the IT and ICT and other business skills to succeed as small business owners, and ultimately employers themselves.
This was how the Regent Enterprise Development Hub, as an entrepreneurial and innovation programme aimed at supporting small business development, came into the picture. To that extent, the school, along with other institutions, heeded the call from the government to deal with the unemployment crisis.
He said South Africans were repeatedly told that SMMEs were the vehicle that can turnaround SA’s sky-high youth unemployment rate, but they could not do it alone and required the concerted effort, support and attention from both the public and private sectors.
Before plotting how to solve the problem, however, we need to understand just how bad the jobless rate among South Africa’s 15-to-24-year-olds is. Data from Stats SA, released in late August 2021, shows that youth unemployment climbed to an eye-watering 64.4% in the second quarter of 2021.
This was the space into which South Africa’s organisations, including higher education institutions, could step as many have the infrastructure to mentor and support fledgling entrepreneurs. This, because they also had the necessary IT and ICT skills and hardware to prepare young entrepreneurs to be ready for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
“The world has all but moved online, and South Africa is certainly up there with the best in the world when it comes to IT. Anyone who wants to start a business must have the appropriate IT skills since that is how they will interface with customers using apps and websites, etc,” Essof said
