Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka says the Joint Initiative for Priority Skills Acquisition (Jipsa) achieved significant progress in the first nine months after it was launched.

She said this was achieved through better coordination and synthesis of information and initiatives.

Launched in March 2006, Jipsa is aimed at addressing skills shortages in order to achieve the objectives of the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (AsgiSA), thus, to speed up economic growth to six percent by 2010 and to halve unemployment by 2014.

It brings together stakeholders from government, business and labour who had been working in related fields but not together.

Priority areas identified by Jipsa to address skills shortages are:

· High-level, world-class engineering and planning skills for the ‘network industries’ – transport, communications and energy.

· City, urban and regional planning and engineering skills.

· Artisan and technical skills, with priority attention to infrastructure development.

· Management and planning skills in education and health.

· Mathematics, science, Information Communication Technology (ICT) and language competence in public education.

· Skills required by the AsgiSA priority sectors such as Tourism, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and Biofuels.

· Cross cutting skills in project and financial management, ICT and Adult Based Education and Training (ABET).

In this regard, Ms Mlambo-Ngcuka said Jipsa had made significant progress in defining the challenges; aligning stakeholders and identifying appropriate resources to respond to the shortage of engineers, artisans, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) skills and other smaller interventions.

Addressing media on the release of the report of the first nine months of JIPSA’s work, Ms Mlambo-Ngcuka explained that the Jipsa stakeholders had reached a consensus on what scarce and priority skills were, and how they were to be acquired and produced.

JIPSA, she said, had also managed to implement some of the short-term programmes such as matching unemployed graduates and employers and the creation and coordination of placement opportunities.

"For the people we can train in the short-term we identified unemployed graduates because those are the people we could give experience in a relatively short space of time.

"We now have 4 700 people that we have placed in different forms of training – 700 have been trained overseas. We think there is much bigger room to do much more in South Africa but also internationally," said the deputy president.

Some of Jipsa's achievements include:

· A detailed plan and more funds to increase the number of B Sc Eng/B Eng graduates by between 480 and 600 compared to the current 1 400 graduates a year.

· A plan to produce 50 000 Artisans by 2010 translating to an annual increase of 7 500 (150 percent).

· Stakeholder discussions are taking place to address qualification, registration and continuing professional development of Town and Regional Planners.

· The BPO and Offshoring business plan was compiled by Department of Trade and Industry (dti) and Business Trust and was launched in the past few weeks.

· Tourism skills plans are being drafted as jointly between four government departments (Environmental Affairs and Tourism, Labour, Education, dti), organised business (TBCSA), Communities (SANGOCO) and Organised labour (COSATU).

· The education department has intensified the improvements of quality of education in public schools by introducing an incentive for schools that produce good results.

· FET colleges have successfully enrolled 25 000 students in the first year of revitalised programmes.

· Direct Second Economy interventions through education and training remain slow and challenging; this includes a need to train people with less than 12 years of schooling.

"In the light of an urgent and greater need to share the benefits of growth going forward, much more has to be done to enhance public education and re-skilling youth out of school languishing in the second economy with less than 12 years of schooling," the deputy president emphasised.

BuaNews