Digital skills and literacy central to solving unemployment issues
The fourth industrial revolution is fast becoming a reality. While many working people are improving their skills for a digital world, thousands of young people leave schools every year without digital literacy.
Most jobs today require some level of digital skills, but it is predicted that in seven years, 5.7-million jobs in SA will be digitally automated. By 2030, robot automation will fill 800million employment positions worldwide. In SA, with huge unemployment and the majority of the population in low-skilled jobs, digital education and training in schools should be a priority.
President Cyril Ramaphosa discussed financial investment in technology at the ITU Telecom world conference in Durban. However, at the jobs summit in October he said very little about the digital economy and skills shortage. As unemployment, job creation, education and the digital revolution are intrinsically linked, this is worrying.
SA’s young adult population (25 to 34 years) suffers a high unemployment rate of 29.9%, compared with 14.1% for people aged 45 to 54. If something is not done soon to prepare the large group of low-skilled workers and young people from historically disadvantaged communities for the economy, the country could suffer.
Middle- and upper-class citizens are able to access smart technologies that aid them socially, academically and professionally. In a study conducted by the University of Cape Town (UCT), adults in these class groups generally see the benefits of their children using mobile devices to access educational tools for school.
Children also use smart mobile devices and the internet to build a sense of identity through social media. They are able to construct ideas of who they are (and who they want to be) by branding themselves. While this may be controversial, many jobs today require employees to have social media profiles.
Conversely, smart technology in less wealthy communities is often seen as a distraction from education by adults, according to the UCT study about children’s digital literacy skills.
The study, which examined households in poor and wealthy communities, showed that poor parents “did not see any educational value in children’s digital play”. It showed that “limited access to mobile phones in crowded living conditions does not allow children to engage with the developmental potentials of these resources nor do they have the sociocultural backgrounds or linguistic resources to engage with the new media”.
Smartphones are expensive items, making them less accessible to poorer communities. Poor children are not exposed to vast amounts of reading material online, while also having almost no access to physical books because of the lack of resources in state-run schools. Social media is also not available to them and so the goal of companies like Facebook and Twitter to “connect” people or “see what’s happening” is impossible to achieve. In SA, digital literacy and inequality work together to aggravate the wealth gap, the digital divide and racial inequality. As Ramaphosa has said, something “extraordinary” needs to happen to decrease the unemployment rate.
If we are to make any efforts to improve the dire conditions of poverty that affect the majority of South Africans, the government and private sector need to make concerted efforts to make smart technology accessible to poor people and digital education needs to be implemented in schools. The president’s goal to produce 275,000 new jobs annually cannot assist people who lack digital skills and literacy.