An elusive search for skills: assessing debates, practices, and experiences in South Africa

ABSTRACT

Planning and identifying skills need is mediated by pre-existing social relations and structures of power in the society. The South African state has explored various methods, policies, programmes, and systems to understand the skills needs of the country. The uneven success of these different attempts can be explained by understanding the complexity of undergoing the task of identifying skills priorities due to the contested nature of the notion of skill and varying ideas about what ought to be prioritized through these processes. The article has three focus areas: 1) assesses three sets of critiques of skills planning in South Africa; 2) shows why the process of identifying skills needs has become elusive; and 3) discusses two illustrative case studies that show examples of initiatives that are excluded from the skills planning processes but are crucial in understanding experiences of Black youth in marginalized communities in relation to education and skills.

KEYWORDS:

• Skills
• planning
• state
• South Africa
• society
• vocational

Introduction

Since the dawn of democracy in 1994 the South African state and policy research community have explored various methods, policies, programmes, and systems to try to get to an understanding of the skills needs in the country. As noted by Kraak (2004) the new institutional architecture of skills development departed from the apartheid system by envisioning training across occupations and qualifications rather than just apprentices and focused on sectors rather than industries; incorporates Small Micro and Medium Enterprises (SMMEs) and accommodates a wide variety of people in the labour market critically – the pre-employed and the unemployed (Kraak, 2004, p. 118).

The framing of the skills discourse in South Africa since 1994 has been about addressing the elusive requirements of capital, resulting in a continuing impasse over the skills question. The search for skills is elusive given the range of factors that shape any definition of skills and skills requirements, these factors are mediated by powerful forces such as technology, policy, macro and microeconomic developments and changes in the broader labour market. Human capital theorists and some educationists use the concept of skill to define the properties a worker needs to have to perform a job. Sociologists are inclined to focus on the job itself and how it impacts on skill requirements. It is these interlinking dynamics that inform the study of skill and ways in which it is identified.

The Skills Development Act, No.97 of 1998 (SDA) and the Skills Levies Act, No.9 of 1999 (SDLA) of South Africa were introduced as part of the government’s human resources development strategy. In terms of the SDLA, companies exceeding R500 000 per annum on their payroll must pay a skills levy of 1% of the monthly payroll. These acts form the cornerstones of the statutory skills development framework of South Africa. The SDA therefore seeks to address the structural deficiencies of the labour market and develop a workforce that can respond to a modern economic environment while considering the equity considerations in South Africa (Ngcwangu, 2016).

This statutory framework has produced a skills regime which largely operates at the ‘sub-structural’ or ‘meso level’ through institutions such as Sector Education and Training Authorities (SETAs), which were historically very strongly linked to private service providers and are recently becoming more aligned to Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) colleges. The programmes associated with this skills system are learnerships, apprenticeships, artisanal training, and several types of internships. The character and orientation of the skills regime is influenced by macro-level policy discourses which find expression within these meso-level institutions and policy frameworks.

The National Skills Development Strategy (NSDS) was described by Kraak (2004) as a new institutional regime for skills formation in post-apartheid South Africa, which he argues has some characteristics of high skill systems elsewhere in the world. The key driver of the NSDS has been the creation of institutions such as SETAs, the National Skills Fund (NSF) and the National Skills Authority (NSA), which were created as platforms for stakeholder engagement in skills development.

This article has three focus areas: 1) assesses three sets of critiques of skills planning in South Africa; 2) shows why the process of identifying skills needs has become elusive in South Africa and 3) discusses two illustrative case studies that show examples of initiatives that are excluded from the skills planning processes but are crucial in understanding experiences of black youth in marginalized communities in relation to education and skills. The two cases are based in the townships of Daveyton and Etwatwa in the Ekurhuleni in the Gauteng Province of South Africa, and they are focused on (a) Support to youth clubs and schools. Providing IT support through coding and literacy initiatives; and (b) skills and peacemaking. These illustrative case studies show that there is no single approach to identifying skills needs that can be developed in the social context of South Africa given the history of racialized inequality and various other forms of social exclusion that persist.

The worsening economic crisis post the COVID-19 lockdowns has resulted in elevated levels of unemployment, resulting in even more young people struggling to find work. According to the National Youth Development Agency (Republic of South Africa, 2023) 7,4 million youth were unemployed, representing 59,3% of the total unemployed. Youth aged between 25 and 34 years made up 65,5% of the unemployed youth and 38,9% of the total unemployed. Young people aged 15–24 years accounted for 34,5% of total youth unemployment and 20,5% of total unemployment. This article argues that while a focus on skill is critical in addressing economic challenges, this is undermined by the structural conditions that shape the political economy of South Africa. The skills planning mechanisms within the country do not connect effectively to the daily lived realities of people residing in Black township communities.

International context of skills development policies

Harris and Clayton (2018) in their discussion of the skills planning processes in the UK and Australia locate the study of skills requirements in the context of the changing nature of work and life as well as the ways work is being changed through a variety of national and global factors. Changes in the structural orientation of capitalism are fundamental to our understanding of the skills question. As Thelen (2012) states, the origins and consequences of different skill trajectories, the forces that sustain or erode skill systems inherited from the past, and the interactions and causal connections between training regimes and related political-economic institutions, especially those governing social relations and social policy are critical in our understanding of the evolution of skills regimes. Some of these international developments and perspectives had a role in influencing South African skills policy in the democratic era.

According to McGrath and Badroodien (2006, p. 487) in the pre-democratic period in South Africa, it appears that it was the relationships between the union movement and sympathetic partners (such as German trade unions, Danish church groups or Australian NGOs) that were key to the development of new ideas. There was a keen sense in these relationships that South Africans were interested in learning from sympathetic partners but that the learning was focused on bringing new experiences and ideas as resources from which to develop a rigorously grounded South African model of skills development.

In her seminal study of the skills regimes of Germany, Britain, the United States and Japan, Thelen (2004) has argued that ‘In Germany and Japan, by contrast, industrialization occurred under authoritarian auspices, and the traditional artisanal sector survived as an important corporate actor in apprenticeship training. In these cases, unions of industrial workers developed in a context in which strategies based on controlling craft –labour markets were not an option, among other reasons because master artisans monopolized these functions. Here skills formation was not contested between labour and capital in industry, but rather, between the artisanal sector and the modern industrial sector’ (Thelen, 2004, p. 22). In other words, particular articulations of skills formation within different countries must be understood against the context of the configurations of power in critical political moments. Thelen’s schema is thus to draw a distinction between non-liberal or coordinated systems (Germany and Japan) and liberal systems (USA and Britain) to make comparisons across the cases by revealing the forces behind these systems.

Writings on skills development on the African continent have tended to link skills to the informal economy. Palmer’s (2007) work on skills in the Ghanaian informal economy; King’s (2007) research on basic and post school education in Kenya and Balwanz’s (2012) work on youth skills development and informal employment in Kenya illustrate these trends in the literature. The general purview of these writings is to identify the informal economies of the said countries as either being an ‘insecure means of livelihood’ (Balwanz, 2012) and the potential of skills or technical education to support development efforts. Palmer (2007) has pointed out that in Ghana there is very little support for skills development in the informal economy, which is a destination for many school-leavers. King (2007) focuses on how in the Kenyan case there has been a contradiction between the governments focus on the education and training system as a whole as compared to the emphasis on sub-sectors of education (such as primary education) by international donors.

McGrath (2002) called for an innovative approach to co-operation on skills development between donor agencies and African states given the changes in work and employment due to the impact of structural changes in the global economy. The emphasis on the informal economy may not be incorrect given the concrete reality of many African economies. It should be stated that the survivalist economies are not the given destiny of these societies their future is linked to re-industrialization of African economies (Mkandawire, 2011) and may present new challenges for the African skills discourse. ‘In order to develop Africa’s economies, it is necessary to develop skills sets to enhance productivity and competitiveness at both the corporate and national levels’ (Twineyo-Kamugisha, 2012, p. 93).

Basically, there are two main strands of writings on the skills question in Africa, one strand suggests that strengthening skills interventions in the informal economy would contribute to the amelioration of poverty and underdevelopment in Africa. This includes the rise of the discourse of informal apprenticeship, which is seen as a significant intervention that can accelerate development while improving artisanal skills. The other strand of writings is linking the skills question to re-industrialization of African economies in the face of a serious decline in manufacturing, these scholars call for a ‘modernization’ of African economies to enhance competitiveness. It is against this context that I locate the debates around skills planning in South Africa and its links to economic development. The implications of these perspectives are that skills planning should not only focus on the formal economy but be developed in a way that helps in understanding the skills of those in marginalized communities as well as the initiatives already occurring in such communities.

Contestations of skills planning for national economic development in South Africa

The breakdown of employment in South Africa and the share of different occupations in the total share of employment in the formal labour market points to the biggest share of the employed being medium-skilled, followed by low-skilled and high-skilled workers (see Table 1 below).

Table 1. Employment by industry Q2 2018 and Q2 2021.

	NUMBER		SHARE OF EMPLOYED
	Q2 2018	Q2 2021	Q2 2018	Q2 2021
	‘000s	‘000s	%	%
Total	16 288	14 942	100.00	100.00
Managers	1 416	1 406	8,7	9.4
Professionals	878	992	5,4	6,6
Technicians	1 448	1 302	8,9	8,8
High-skilled	3 741	3 718	23,0	24,9
Clerks	1 704	1 474	10,5	9,9
Services and sales	2 635	2 322	16,2	15,5
Skilled agricultural workers	64	45	0,4	0,3
Craft and related trades	2 007	1 599	12,3	10,7
Operators and assemblers	1 364	1 242	8,4	8,3
Medium-skilled	7 773	6 681	47,7	44,7
Elementary occupations	3 775	3 605	23,2	24,1
Domestic workers	996	892	6,1	6,0
Low-skilled	4 772	4 497	29,3	30,1

Source: Skills Supply and Demand in South Africa: Labour Market Intelligence Research Programme, 2022, pg 15.

In South Africa, the state and policy research communities have explored various methods, policies, programmes, and systems to try to get to an understanding of the skills needs in the country. Shortly after the post-apartheid government was ushered in 1994 efforts were put in place to invest in skills planning and interventionfor example, at the national level the Joint Initiative for Priority Skills Acquisition (JIPSA) under the Accelerated Shared Growth Initiative (ASGISA) sought to accelerate skills development through targeted interventions in ‘scarce skills’ occupations. At the meso-level, the Sector Education and Training (SETA) system produces annual Sector Skills Plans (SSPs) which identify skills needs based on employer and worker identified trends. In addition, the state has other mechanisms for identifying skills requirements such as Occupations in High Demand List, which are generated to inform the Department of Home Affairs immigration system in awarding scarce skills visas for those wanting to work and live in South Africa. There is also the Human Resources Development Council (HRDC) which is led by the Deputy President of South Africa. All these initiatives pointed to a need for a more centralized approach to skills planning, this resulted in the creation of the Labour Market Intelligence Programme (LMIP) in 2012, according to academics involved in its creation ‘The LMIP was funded by government to inform its attempts to build a centralized mechanism for skills planning. A review of the “state of the art” of research in relation to key policy concerns was conducted in 2012, informing the focus and approaches used for multiple research projects organized under six themes. The LMIP produced a significant body of labour market information and research to strengthen the South African evidence base for skills planning over the medium to long term’ (Kruss & Wildschut, 2019, p. 6). At the core of the challenge in South Africa is the need to understand the tension between success in the technical development of skills planning mechanisms and the structural determinants of political-economic development that can lead to successful skills planning approaches.

The uneven success of these different attempts can be explained by understanding the complexity of undergoing the task of identifying skills priorities due to the contested nature of the notion of skill and normative ideas about what ought to be prioritized through these processes. How we undertake national, local, and sectoral skills planning, and the information sets that we use, is of considerable importance as skills planning has moved to the centre of education and training policies targeted at unemployment, poverty alleviation and economic growth (Powell, 2021). My assessment of the debate over skills planning in South Africa is that it straddles three sets of issues. (1) Inadequacy of current approaches and methodologies; (2) Dominance of a supply and demand orthodoxy; and (3) Lack of focus on the informal economy.

Three interrelated debates in the literature

Inadequacy of current approaches and methodologies

A view that is prevalent amongst critical scholars in South Africa is that neoliberal assumptions about education and training tend to produce a reductionist view of the role of the relationship between education, training, and the economy in the context of a vague understanding of what skills identification ought to entail. Vally and Motala (2014, p. 31) argue that education may increase employability but is not an automatic guarantee for full employment; that an instrumentalist view of the role of education is unhelpful especially as such a view is always based on a raft of unjustified claims about the outcomes of education and skills in capitalist societies; that education and training are not simply a handmaiden for resolving the problems of low economic output; and that a wide range of exogenous factors and social relations (inherent in all societies) circumscribe the potential value of education and training.

There is also a tendency of vagueness in the usage of terminologies in South Africa, quite often the notion of ‘skill’ and the notion of ‘occupation’ are used interchangeably which tends to blur the terrain in which identification of skills needs occurs. Balwanz and Ngcwangu (2016) argue that there are three problems with equating skill with occupation. First, for a skill to be included on SETA ‘scarce skills’ lists or the List of occupations in high demand, an occupation must be identified as one of the thousands of occupations identified in the Organising Framework of Occupations. As such, discourse on skills (and post-school education reform) is framed from within the limitations of the Organising Framework of Occupations (OFO). Secondly, an occupational shortage is different from a skills shortage. To be qualified to fill a vacancy, an applicant may not only need a certain skill (or related qualification or experience) but may also need additional (professional or legal) certifications and affiliations. Thirdly, the most fundamental problem is that occupation is a blunt and highly inflexible way to define ‘skill’ – particularly if there is a desire for a broader conceptualization of ‘skills’ in South African economy and society (Balwanz & Ngcwangu, 2016, p. 41). This is coupled with underlying issues of inequality along the lines of race, class, gender, and geography that influence the question of what the most suitable mechanism of identifying skills needs would be appropriate in the South African context.

At the core of critiques of planning strategies and approaches is the lack of coherence across various components of the state in skills planning resulting in weak outcomes and fragmentation of strategies. There is also a strong reliance on perceptions of skills needs by employer representatives who are not always au fait with the inner workings of their respective industries. In relation to the National Human Resources Development Council (HRDC), an argument advanced by Allais et al. (2017) is that the concept of national human resource development, with its focus on the many different factors that lead to individuals being more ‘developed’ as human resources, is simply too broad and too diffuse to be a way of ensuring focused intervention in the skills formation system. But paradoxically, it is also too narrow, because it poses the development of human resources as the solution to all manner of social problems, instead of looking at the economic and social policies that are preventing both the development of skills and general human well-being. So, the South African HRD Council hardly touches on difficult issues in relation to industrial relations and labour market regulation, the weakness of industrial strategy and the economy more broadly (Allais et al., 2017, p. 10).

There are some scholars who have argued for a broader conceptualization of skills planning, which would mean shifting the focus of skills planning from the skills needed for profit to the skills needed for social and economic transformation (Powell, 2021, p. 97). This underlines the difficulties in agreeing on a mutual understanding and approach to skills planning. According to Buchanan (2019, p. 19) skills planning alone cannot make up for deficient labour demand or inadequacies in education and training systems. Better skills planning is, however, an essential ingredient in a policy mix concerned with social and economic renewal. Basically, Powell (2021) challenges a narrow conception of skill that only prioritizes the needs of capitalist enterprises and excludes a wider societal approach to skill. Skills cannot be understood in isolation from the social relations within which they are embedded and that skills may perform other kinds of work within a socio-political economy, both to reproduce the social order and to enable change (Sundar, 2018, p. 274).

Dominance of a supply and demand orthodoxy

The skills planning cycles and processes in South Africa are largely centred on the orthodoxy of the notion of balancing supply and demand for skills within the formal labour market. This is strongly influenced by linear assumptions about the relationship between education, training, and the economy. Allais and Marock (2020) have criticized simplistic approaches based on supply and demand, and they argue that these are dichotomized wherein demand is in the economy, supply of skills is exogenous and must simply meet the needs of the economy. Allais and Marock (2020) maintain that what is needed is a shift away from a model that reduces supply and demand to a list of qualifications required, based on retrospective analysis of labour markets towards a focus on skills formation (including qualifications and the nature of provision) as part of the development of the industrial strategy.

The logic that ‘scarce skills’ is the most crucial constraint to the development of South Africa’s economy is quite pervasive within the broad business sector. However, it should be noted that sceptics to this view such as (Chang, 2010) maintain there is very little empirical basis for assuming that the ‘lack of skills’ will negatively affect economic productivity:

The link between what a production line worker in a car factory learned in school physics and his productivity is rather tenuous. The importance of apprenticeship and on-the-job training in many professions testifies to the limited relevance of school education for worker productivity. So, even the supposedly productivity-oriented parts of education are not as relevant for raising productivity as we think. This is not an argument for less education or no education; this is an argument that trying to make education ‘relevant’ to the market has proven to be somewhat rhetorical and within it having inherent contradictions because even ‘relevant’ education or ‘outcomes based’ education may not be able to produce ‘ready-made workers’. (Chang, 2010, p. 182)

Harvey notes that, ‘There are many advantageous ways for capital to address problems of labour scarcity. Labour saving technologies and organizational innovations can throw people out of work and into the industrial reserve. The result is a “floating” army of laid-off workers whose very existence puts downward pressure on wages. Capital simultaneously manipulates both the supply and demand for labour’ (Harvey, 2011, p. 60).

The prevalent approach amongst employers is that the schooling system and university are failing to produce qualified or suitable candidates for employment, although despite these challenges, employers still employ these supposedly incompetent graduates. So, the refrain that inferior quality will affect performance continues to shape the way in which business approaches the skills development issue. This point is further accentuated by Brown et al. (2011) ‘Governments have a political duty to privilege their citizens, but capitalism has no such loyalty. Where it is given room to breathe, it tirelessly accumulates capital in whatever ways it can with scant regard for existing arrangements’ (Brown et al., 2011, p. 113).

The orientation of supply and demand of skills is based on the economic logic that to address the complex historical and inequality context of South Africa what is needed is matching of available labour (and skills) to the vacancies and jobs that are available in the capitalist labour market. A future skills policy that effectively responds to the challenge of achieving inclusive growth in the context of changing labor markets requires a more integrated and broader perspective that goes beyond the traditional boundaries of skills policies (Sakamoto, 2019, p. 70). This is clearly more complex than some of the research and policy directives may suggest. The LMIP works on the premise of understanding the complexities of how demand and supply interact to guide future investments and interventions in skills development. In simple terms scholars and activists (Allais & Marock, 2020; Balwanz & Ngcwangu, 2016; Vally & Motala, 2014) coalesce around the view that the skills question has tended to be aligned to economic growth, competitiveness, and efficiency, with less attention (particularly in the period of the height neoliberal policies) being paid to the broader societal purposes of skill beyond the narrow ‘supply and demand’ matching within the labour market.

Lack of focus on the informal economy

In South Africa, the informal sector has a smaller, but still significant, total share of employment, with over 2.5 million people, making up 20% of total employment in the country. It contributes about 5.1% of the country’s GDP (Masuku & Nzewi, 2021). The informal economy is seen by policymakers as having the potential to contribute to job creation, absorb those that are unable to thrive in the formal economy and potentially be a space for entrepreneurs to thrive. State policy has sought to develop mechanisms to regulate, grow and support the development of the ‘township economy’.¹

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) also acknowledges the importance of the informal economy by stating that ‘The role of training in promoting the transfer of activities from the informal to the formal economy involves broadening access to basic education, supporting informal means of developing skills, and combining vocational and entrepreneurship training to facilitate the formalization of small enterprise’ (International Labour Organisation [ILO], 2010, p. 16). The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) takes a more specific look at the future of work and the opportunities that will arise and states that ‘Driven by these trends, the future of work will no doubt offer unparalleled opportunities. Modern technologies and new markets will generate new and more productive jobs. The ability to de-bundle jobs into smaller tasks will allow work to be conducted more efficiently on a truly global, digital assembly line. In the future, workers are likely to have more say about who they work for, how much they work, as well as where and when they work. Such increased flexibility will provide greater opportunities for under-represented groups to participate into the labour market, such as women, senior workers, and those with disabilities’ (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2017, p. 2).

The belief in the informal economy as a ‘shock absorber’ during times of crisis is equally challenged by researchers, for example in their study of the impact of the global financial crisis in 2008, Skinner and Rogan (2019) state that over the six-year period that included the single largest cyclical shock to the post-apartheid economy, the informal sector, at the aggregate, was not absorbing the jobs that had been ‘lost’ in the formal-sector. Indeed, particularly during the crisis period (2008–2009) in which aggregate job losses were experienced, informal-sector employment declined relatively more than formal-sector employment. At the height of the crisis (the third quarter of 2009), the informal-sector share of total non-agricultural employment decreased to as low as 16% (Skinner & Rogan, 2019, p. 4).

These analyses of the potential of the informal economy in South Africa’s socio-economic development bring into focus the question of what kinds of skills interventions should take place in the informal economy and how national policy on skills planning ensures that the informal economy is included. Buchanan (2019) argues that a new skills settlement is needed where the unemployed and those involved in the informal sector become active participants in developing a new trajectory. The term ‘second economy’ was used in South Africa as reference to the informal and unregulated parts of the economy, and this was based on former President Thabo Mbeki’s characterization of South Africa having a dualistic economy of a formal ‘first’ economy and an informal ‘second economy’. Government policy was then framed around interventions that would lead to overcoming this duality. Kraak (2005) stated that modest growth off a small base is clearly a defining feature of skills development in the second economy. However, the possibilities of further growth are limited by several factors. Firstly, the low labour-absorbing economic growth trajectory that characterizes South Africa’s economy. Skills development in the second economy will always be limited in its ability to contribute to sustainable employment until this seemingly insurmountable structural impediment is overcome. Secondly, the fact that training is occurring primarily in large and medium-sized firms – enterprises that would train irrespective of incentives and encouragements from government (Kraak, 2005, p. 447). The informal economy presents a more complex challenge for skills planning, there is a greater stratification in terms of work and skills; daily economy activity is differentiated and stratified; there are spatial divisions across urban and rural areas and there are high levels of vulnerability amongst the participants given the ways in which they are employed and the types of work they undertake. It is against this backdrop that I now discuss two illustrative case studies that underly experiences and of segments of society that are easily excluded from the core processes of skills planning in South Africa.

Two illustrative case studies

The process of identifying skills needs and planning skills requirements needs to include those from marginalized communities as they experience the worst levels of socio-economic underdevelopment, poverty, unemployment, and inequality. There is still no mechanism to link marginalized communities to the broader national agenda of skills planning. The scale of the skills planning challenge requires more actors to be involved and a multiplicity of voices to contribute to shaping future investments in skills training in the country. The earlier sections of the paper have analysed the academic literature and policy research on skills planning, this section seeks to show perspectives and experiences which are not well addressed within the formal processes of skills planning.

These case studies arise out of my research on the struggles of unemployed Black youths in the townships of Daveyton, Tembisa and Etwatwa in the Ekurhuleni region of the Gauteng Province in South Africa. Two logics drove the selection of these case studies; (1) to show that outside of the formal processes of skills planning there are other initiatives that focus on skills but do not always fall within the skills ecosystems. Quite often community-based initiatives realise the value of deploying the language of skills to attract support from funders and recognition by the state, using the notion of skill gives legitimacy to developmental initiatives regardless of the depth of skills provision; (2) the current systems do not adequately account for activities that are not easily aligned to economic assumptions of growth and competitiveness. Within Black townships, various initiatives have arisen to address the intractable crisis of youth unemployment through Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and various community-based initiatives.

The youth unemployment problem and transitions to work are shaped by the structural conditions that determine economic and social relations in society. In this sense also, youth’s transition processes are not homogeneous, because there are different ‘worlds of inclusion’ (Dubar, 2001) differentiated according to occupational sectors, characteristics of the companies, intermediaries of employment, educational institutions and vocational training, and youth segments. The characterization of this diversity requires passing from general observation to an approach that puts a spotlight on a specific sector of activity.

There are tensions over which interventions are appropriate for providing meaningful support to the unemployed youth in black working-class townships. On the one hand, there are more optimistic accounts of the role of NGOs as youth employment intermediaries that can be found, for example, in recent research by Dieltiens (2015) who argues that ‘NGOs may have a number of advantages over both market‐based and government‐ employment initiatives. Because their activities are often on a smaller scale than government initiatives and are not driven to meet large targets, they have the flexibility to experiment with innovative ideas without the burden of bureaucratic procedures. On the other hand, they often have donor funding and so are free from pursuing market‐ or profit‐driven objectives. They can therefore offer a broader range of services to the unemployed youth than commercial employment agencies could’ (Dieltiens, 2015, p. 2).

On the other hand, there is a critical view that the NGOs are often characterized by inconsistencies and contradictions which as Nomsenge (2018) who argues that ‘interventions often serve to moderate, rather than uproot, the set of socio-economic features for which non-state intervention continues to be hailed and hallowed’. Simply put, the critique is that the NGO’s are equally concerned with their self-preservation and organizational legitimacy. The result is that the youth unemployment crisis has given rise to the emergence of many organizations and groupings aiming to contribute to the amelioration of the crisis.

In this study, two organizations were selected based on referrals and recommendations from within the Daveyton community. They have an explicit focus on youth empowerment, skills training, and education. The interesting finding is that many of these organizations do not self-identify as aiming to confront the unemployment challenge per se, a common thread between them is to provide the youth access to ways of looking for work or to supply them with resources that they can use in pursuing work opportunities in the surrounding areas. These two case studies show the efforts, organizations and initiatives within Black communities that are focused on youth empowerment but are often not recognized when formal skills planning initiatives are conceptualized Table 2.

Table 2. Two case studies.

NGO/Community group	Nature of interventions
Southern African Association of Youth Clubs (SAAYC)	Support to youth clubs and schools. Providing IT support through ‘coding’ and literacy initiatives
Meshack Bhuda	‘Skills’, peacemaking,

Case study 1- Southern African association of youth clubs

Programme description

This is an organization which has been functioning in a community called Etwatwa adjacent to Daveyton. The organization recruits young people who are in youth clubs; they define youth clubs as three or more young people gathered for a social change in their community and doing something to change the economy, the state of where they are economically. They teach them the skills, how to formalize themselves, how to have board of directors, which direction to go, give them training and offer them opportunities that arise, if they are doing photography, for example, they link them with a studio, people that sell cameras at the lesser rate, also link them with the opportunities for maybe internships.

Programme specifics

Amongst many other programmes they have two unbelievably valuable programmes. (1) They have a Club House programme that is for young people between the ages of 11 and 19, for them to learn technology. It seeks to answer the need that the government school does not answer which is the creative side of the child. So, if a child is interested in talking non-stop, they have a podcaster and a radio presenter and say ‘just be a radio presenter’; the ultimate idea they have is to give young people the necessary skills for them to be independent. (2) Another programme is the Educational Support Programme (ESP) a programme that tries to assist local schools to give young people an opportunity to come to the centre when they want to do research, and print as well as type their homework.

Case study 2- Meshack Bhuda initiative

Programme specifics

This organization was registered in 2013 with three focus areas on youth empowerment. Below is a synopsis of their programmes and their alignment to skills development and access to economic opportunities.

Focus area 1- bullying programme

They identify schools where bullying is rife through a district psychologist. They then go to the school and roll out the programme wherein they sit with the school management team to try and do an assessment of what the problem is. They tailor-make a response to the problem because what this school one school is suffering from might not be the same as that which another school is struggling with. What they also do is to ask the Department of Education for a database of all the schools that scored below 50% in their matric (grade 12) results each year, their experience of collaborating with schools showed that the issue of ill-discipline contributes to academic performance.

Focus area 2: youth skills development programme (no stipend)

This programme is packaged as a business course, computer skills and job readiness programme together. They literally teach the youth how to successfully apply for jobs.

Focus area 3: learnership programme (stipend)

A matric qualification is a requirement and the learnership has a 30% theory & 70% practical component. With learnerships, they could be from NQF level 4, and some will take someone with a grade 11 and some will strictly be for grade 12s; it is a twelve-month programme and is a full qualification. As they are dealing with youth from diverse backgrounds, they structure their courses in a flexible manner to curb absenteeism.

The two case studies illustrate the importance placed on education and skills development within South Africa’s marginalized Black communities and initiatives taken by local activists and volunteers. These give us a sense of two main issues that relate to skills planning and education (1) its limits, opportunities, treatments in SA in relation to (un)employment. These programmes mostly have a component of a computer course post high school but what does this say about Information Technology (IT) training in high schools? and (2) re-skilling and training of young people for the available opportunities and not necessarily their talents.

Discussion

As the political transition unfolded in South Africa, the field of researching skills increasingly became a technocratic issue linked to institutional reforms associated with large-scale reforms in education policy. The labour market in the current phase of capitalist development is showing signs of a deepening crisis of employment, insecurity and fragmentation which is characterized by a growing Precariat, a stratum of workers who are precariously employed as casualization and informalization of labour is increasing. In addition, what we observe in South Africa is the rise of temporary employment services or ‘labour broking’ which further entrenches the job insecurity of workers as they are hired through secondary employers whose contractual arrangement does not have similar benefits to those of permanently employed workers.

The research shows that understanding this variety of organizational forms will expand our scope of thinking about approaches to ameliorating the youth unemployment crisis. The importance of looking at the way in which these programmes operate, is that increasingly the South African discourse on youth unemployment is characterized by a prevalence of voluntarist approaches to addressing the crisis. This has resulted in approaches that tend to be technocratic in nature and not attempts at consolidating civil society's collective responses to the challenges of youth unemployment. Additionally, the role of locally based NGOs and Not for Profit Organisations (NPOs) is critical to understand as we are seeing a growth of such initiatives aimed at supporting the youth in confronting their socio-economic challenges.

A strategic question that arises out of this research is how the state ought to respond to the challenge of the growing numbers of unemployed who are surviving side-by-side and outside of the existing frameworks for skills planning. More clarity is needed on how to ensure that the interests of those in marginalized communities are equally incorporated into the larger agenda of skills planning in the country. This will pose new questions as skills planning is mostly orientated to a ‘job’ or employment.

The article emphasized the limitations of current approaches to skills planning and recognition of initiatives that play a direct role in interacting with youth in marginalized communities. This is to argue that there are sections of the society that are excluded from the main research and skills planning agendas, this is despite the significant ways in which such locally based initiatives are making a difference in the lives of young people. Despite huge investments in developing a coherent skill planning agenda, these processes have proved to be elusive in producing concrete understandings of skills needs and the direction of South Africa’s development agenda.

I contend that there is a need to reconceptualize skills planning beyond the traditional boundaries and frameworks that currently inform the field. The article pointed out three issues that straddle the debate on skills planning in South Africa; (1) Inadequacy of current approaches and methodologies; (2) Dominance of a supply and demand orthodoxy; and (3) Lack of focus on the informal economy. By acknowledging these issues, a more inclusive approach to skills planning can emerge which aligns to the overall development of South African society and redress of the historical imbalances that are inherited from the country’s colonial and apartheid past.

Limitations of the paper

The paper draws largely on secondary documentary, academic papers and a conceptual approach to framing the arguments in the paper. While this approach helps in clarifying the critique of the search for skills being elusive, it tends to overlook the value of available empirical data that points to challenges of understanding skills needs. South African research on skills shortages has been driven by Economics and Labour Market research, the paper has not done an in-depth analysis of such research but has drawn on more qualitative research within Black communities. It is possible that there are insights within the quantitative research that have not been adequately engaged with.

Conclusion and recommendations

This article has shown that current mechanisms of identifying skills needs within the state system do not adequately encompass the social inequalities of South Africa, where the Black majority reside in townships and their various skills are not known or realized through such processes. Whereas the two case studies discussed in the paper show some initiatives of young people which are educational and focused on community-based activities that are more orientated towards the informal economic sector. My argument is that the existing mechanisms of skills identification do not adequately address the range of initiatives that a wider range of societal groups are engaged in that are related to skills upliftment.

Some recommendations on what could be done to respond to this challenge include:

• – Expansion of the New Venture Creation projects of the SETAs so that they are well funded and linked to enterprise or cooperative initiatives that can lead to economic self-sufficiency.

• – Usage of skills development funds and leverage to work with organizations working in communities, to absorb young trainees who can help those organizations to develop. Many civil society-based organizations struggle with funding and therefore cannot meet their goals of working closely with the youth.

• – There must be an institutional approach to connecting skills training resources to community upliftment at a scale that can show measurable changes. This can include initiatives that impact the local market in the ‘non-traded’ market which Mayer and Altman (2005) define as distinct from non-tradable. It includes most goods and services such as construction or social services, which are more oriented towards the local market.

• – Industrial and economic policies of the state must make the structural changes necessary to create employment and economic opportunities for the millions of unemployed people. Currently, skills training is seen as a panacea for the unemployment crisis, but it needs to be aligned to changes in the economy and not just projects that are done on an ad hoc basis or through the project’s logic of the state machinery. Meaningful change to address the historical legacy of racialized inequality is vital to ensure that an equitable skill planning system is attained.

Acknowledgments

I acknowledge the National Research Foundation (NRF) Centre of Excellence (COE) in Human Development on Youth Development Policies and Practices in a South African Metropolitan Municipality – project number Ref. OPP2018001.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation [OPP2018001].

Notes

1. In South Africa, the word township and location refer to black/non-white urban residential areas. South Africans use township to speak of suburb is unlike the real meaning of the word – which is planning/titling scheme/neighborhood plan.