By Shaun Benton

A focus on harnessing the priority skills vital for accelerated and shared growth in South Africa will turn into action on 27 March with the launch of the Joint Initiative on Priority Skills Acquisition, otherwise known as Jipsa.

The Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (Asgisa) has identified six factors that constrain growth in the country. One of these is the shortage of skilled labour.

Jipsa is a high-level task team and its job is to identify urgent skills needs and advise on ways to respond to these challenges.

The Deputy President, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, who is leading Asgisa, is to chair the Jipsa task team.

Already, several urgent interventions have been identified, such as mentoring programmes and overseas placement of trainees to fast-track their development.

Other interventions may include special training programmes, bringing back retirees or expatriate South Africans, and drawing in new immigrants where necessary.

Jipsa will have an initial life-span of three years, after which its future will be reviewed.

While chaired by Mlambo-Ngcuka, the rest of the Jipsa task team – approved by cabinet – will comprise senior representatives of government, labour, business, youth, women, academic institutions, science councils and state-owned enterprises.

The general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers, Gwede Mantashe, will be the chairperson of the Jipsa technical working group.

The National Business Initiative will constitute a secretariat for the Jipsa project and cabinet has agreed that people with disabilities needed to be integrated into Jipsa activities.

Government has acknowledged that the single greatest impediment to its public infrastructure programmes – as well as private investment programmes - is the country’s shortage of skills.

Professional skills such as those provided by engineers and scientists, financial, personnel and project managers and skilled technical employees such as artisans and information technology technicians are critically needed as the economy moves into higher gear.

It is widely acknowledged that the shortfall in these skills is due to the deleterious policies of the apartheid era, but also the slowness of South Africa’s education and skills development institutions to catch up with the current acceleration of economic growth.

Compounding the problem, the shortage of suitably skilled labour is amplified by the cost effects on labour of apartheid spatial patterns.

Those parts of the legacy of apartheid most difficult to unwind are the deliberately inferior system of education and the irrational patterns of population settlement, which pushes up the price of labour by the fact that many workers live a great distance from their places of work.

Intended interventions in the educational sphere include a major upgrading of Further Education and Training colleges as well as a major revamping of the Adult Basic and Education Training programme, based on models developed in Cuba and New Zealand.

Key interventions in the skills sphere include the development of an Employment Services System (to close the gap between potential employers and employees), and in the shorter term, the development of a scarce skills database based directly on the expected needs of the over 100 individual projects included in Asgisa.

Other key skills projects include the deployment of experienced professionals and managers – including retired experts - to local governments to improve project development implementation and maintenance capabilities.

Government is to also pay close attention to the inclusion of women in line with its commitment to a gender-sensitive implementation of Asgisa interventions.

With an eye on the potential contributions and responsibilities of the private sector as well as ordinary citizens, Government and the President himself have sought to make South Africans aware that Asgisa is a national, shared growth initiative rather than “government’s programme”.

Source: BuaNews