New shift begins to produce employers instead of job seekers
As head of the department of rural development and agrarian reform (DRDAR), I will ensure that graduates placed on farms and related enterprises form their own businesses.
The department has placed unemployed graduates in agriculture sector enterprises so that they can learn to be business owners who are employers, instead of job seekers.
The two-year entrepreneurial placement programme for 120 unemployed graduates is funded through the comprehensive agricultural support programme (Casp) and is an opportunity for young people to be placed with farms and related enterprises to gain entrepreneurial experience so that they become job creators.
The important thing is that we don’t want to do a hit-and-run here, where we take 120 graduates for two years and after that they go back to being unemployed.
The department will refocus and reshape its budget so that these unemployed agriculture graduates can start their own businesses.
We will look at how to avail the resources of government to these youngsters so that they can stretch their ideas in whatever commodities they want to venture into.
In that vein we want to look at how we refocus and reshape the budget of the department and engage other government entities and the private sector.
We have a sizeable budget that comes from Casp for training. We will have to set aside a portion of this budget for these young adults so that we can literally pump it to assist them in starting enterprises.
We are not going to achieve development and the results we want to see if we don’t become intentional to ensure young farmers are supported.
As long as we beat about the bush, thumbsucking and doing little everywhere, we are not going to have an impact.
We are looking at how to concentrate, bring in our resources and fine-tune the programme to address the problem.
We will reshape our budgeting process, using money from Casp and other programmes to develop these youngsters.
We are going to be engaging the department of small business and a lot of private partners that I am very sure are going to be willing to partner with us to incubate the great agricultural ideas that are going to come out of these young people.
We want to see the participation of young people, blacks in particular, in the agriculture sector that is the bigger aim of this programme.
This is to address the issue of unemployment in the country, specifically the province, within the sector of agriculture.
As you would know, we are the highest in the country when it comes to the unemployment rate.
The Eastern Cape is leading in food insecurity and we’ve got the highest number of youth sitting at home unemployed, including graduates.
Our aim is not just to keep them for two years to sit around and see a little, but they should expand their thinking so that they look beyond finding jobs, but create them.
The government wants the graduates to be able to think on their own and see how they can create jobs.
We want to increase the pool of entrepreneurs in the agricultural space.
The Eastern Cape has been praised by everyone as having potential because of its natural resources, good climate and good soils, but we’ve been literally stuck in that potential as a province.
We have not been able to graduate from that potential.
We do understand that if we don’t actively bring in the young people who can think differently about the sector, who have different energy, who are more energetic than we are in this sector — we will be lacking.
There is an older generation of farmers worldwide, and government through this programme is attracting young people because they will come with more energy and innovative ideas on how to drive agriculture.
They will assist us to graduate from potential to realise the potential of this province.
I’m excited that both the graduates and host farmers see this opportunity as a vehicle to address food insecurity, unemployment and create a new crop of farmers.
This is the third cohort and during the first one we learnt that we were grooming employees, hence we are now working on creating enterprises.
In the second batch, we ran a competition where graduates presented their business plans and the winners were provided with start-up capital by DRDAR.
MEC Nonkqubela Pieters has instructed us to use the available government infrastructure to ensure the graduates are venturing into different commodities.
We will utilise the research centres, training centres and irrigation schemes to boost the economic impact of these youngsters.