Equipping SA’s youth for a digital future will help curb unemployment

Country’s prospects no longer lie in mining or agriculture, but in online jobs that will require skilled workers

If you scroll through the new jobs the world is likely to see in the next few decades, the key ingredient in most of them is digital. This catch-all word covers many industries, where digital technology is making it easier and faster to do a range of things. As new technologies emerge, so do new jobs. A decade ago, no-one had Csuite job titles such as chief innovation officer, chief digital officer or the slightly twee “chief imagineer”. Lower down the corporate ladder there are innumerable jobs to manage social media and answer the sometimes puerile rants of the unruly horde of complainers on Twitter.

As much as SA has built itself on mining and agriculture and President Cyril Ramaphosa argued in the state of the nation address that these aren’t “sunset” industries the reality is they obviously are.

There is only so much gold in the ground, and it gets harder and more expensive to mine. Similarly, the once-unassailable diamond industry is experiencing disruption from the manufacturing of artificial gems. Gold and diamond mining seem unlikely industries to be disrupted by technology, but they will be.

One of the biggest innovations in mining is a drive to replace workers with robots, which aren’t affected by the dangers, heat and cramped working spaces of very deep mining operations.

Progress in this sphere is limited at the moment, but it’s inevitable that automation technology will find its way into mining not the algorithms replacing white-collar jobs, but actual robots doing the work.

Information technology skills, on the other hand, are an indispensable commodity just ask the city of Bengaluru, which turned itself into a global IT powerhouse. Ask Ireland, which has become a hub for global tech firms such as Apple, Google and LinkedIn, mostly because of its favourable tax rates. It’s become a thriving tech hub in Europe as a result. Twenty years ago, that wasn’t the case. But political will and tax breaks have turned it into a silicon tax haven. Looking to revive industries such as mining and seeking investment for infrastructure and other development is part of the toolkit of a president seeking to undo nearly a decade of stagnation under former presi-dunce Jacob Zuma.

But Ramaphosa needs to broaden his scope and look at other ways to create employment. SA needs to start thinking outside the traditional industrial boxes that have defined the economy globally the growth engines of most economies are small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

The annual SME survey by World Wide Worx shows that SMEs with websites are more likely to be highly competitive than those that don’t. About 30% of businesses surveyed said their business wouldn’t be possible without websites.

Of those SMEs with websites, 30% said they were “strongly profitable” and only 14% without sites could say the same. Merely having a website doubled the likelihood of being strongly profitable, according to 2018’s report. That’s just a website.

Our biggest problem, a part of the systemic corruption the Zupta years left us, is the souldestroying lack of jobs. SA had a shocking unemployment rate of 27.2% in the second quarter of 2018. Making it worse is that it grew by half a percentage point from 26.7% in the first quarter.

Youth unemployment figures are heartbreaking. The unemployment rate among young people aged 15-34 was 38.2%, implying that more than one in three young people in the labour force did not have a job in the first quarter of 2018, Stats SA reported in 2018.

To be young in SA is to face dismal employment prospects. “The burden of unemployment is also concentrated among the youth as they account for 63.5% of the total number of unemployed persons,” Stats SA said.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. These are the digital born-frees they are born not only into a democratic SA but with the grand democratising effect of the internet.

Training them in IT skills especially to write software code, hence their proud appellation as coders is a no-brainer. But like all science and engineering careers, this is a long process and requires not only kids with the inclination to study this field but also the decade-long education process to teach and nurture the foundations of scientific, mathematical and engineering understanding and knowledge.

Luckily, the internet allows for many different kinds of careers, including skills to build and manage websites; to create e-commerce sites that enable businesses to sell online and grow their market base; and to communicate with the millions of other people going online.

Digital marketing skills are the obvious lowhanging fruit.

Google launched a project in April 2016 to train 1-million young Africans in digital skills, a target it met within a year.

The company has now trained more than 2million young Africans in 29 countries and said in 2017 that it aimed to educate 10-million youngsters in five years.

Youth-skills company Digify Africa, previously known as Livity Africa, has trained 85,000 people in the past seven years. It was funded by Google and is now supported by Facebook.

If you want to have your spirits lifted in these days of nearly 64% youth unemployment and R17/l petrol, listen to some of these youngsters talking about how empowered they feel learning digital skills.

They have learnt how to be digitally active with a skills set that is akin to their everyday internet habits. They can now manage social media accounts for big corporates, run social media campaigns and find a sense of self-worth in work.

They are the digital born-frees and they are the future. That’s who Ramaphosa should invest in.

Shapshak is editor in chief of Stuff (Stuff.co.za).