Youth training key to alleviating poverty

YOUTH entrepreneurship leads to financial emancipation. Oliver Reginald Tambo once said: “The children of any nation are its future. A country, a movement, a person that does not value its youth and children does not deserve its future.”

In echoing what Tambo said, and since it is Youth Month, I’d like to applaud the organs of state that continue to level the playing fields to propel today’s youth to greater heights.

Through a partnership between the Gauteng National Rural Youth Service Corps of the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform, participants are recruited who have been identified to have a potential to open businesses, and they are encouraged to take an NQF level 4 course in New Venture Creation.

The course provides aspiring entrepreneurs in the small, medium and micro enterprise (SMME) sector with the technical, business, managerial and personal skills to create and sustain a business. After training they are taken to the Small Enterprise Development Agency for incubation.

SMMEs have a greater potential to not only develop entrepreneurs but in their business terrain they also utilise local raw materials, generate employment, encourage rural development, and mobilise communal mutual savings and the possibilities for self-employment.

With current youth unemployment of 52.40% in South Africa, training is the way to go.

This will help to alleviate poverty, not to mention assist in the inclusion of the youth in the mainstream economic dispensation of the country.