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South Africa: Rural Life Upward Bound |
| Source: |
www.sanews.gov.za |
| Source Date: |
Friday, April 25, 2014 |
| Focus: |
ICT for MDGs
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| Country: |
South Africa |
| Created: |
Apr 25, 2014 |
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Narysec is an important skills development programme, which is transforming young people in the rural areas from being job seekers to being job creators in their own right, breaking the vicious cycle of social grant dependency.
Deputy Minister in the Presidency: Performance, Monitoring and Evaluation, Obed Bapela, affirmed the programme’s role in roping in young people from the fringes of economic activity.
“The Presidency is the developer of youth policy in the country. Narysec is indeed becoming an intervention programme taking young people, who are unskilled and unemployed in the rural areas, and giving them a second opportunity to be able to get the necessary skills to either seek employment or start their own entrepreneurial opportunities.
“It is a very good programme and it has been supported and sustained. We hope that other departments will develop their own programmes that are similar to Narysec to [counter the] challenge of youth skills development,” he said.
Narysec: a brief history
The department launched Narysec in 2011, with the view of giving opportunities to rural youth between the ages of 18 - 35 by arming them with skills such as plumbing, farming, game ranging, electricity and animal husbandry, to mention but a few.
The learning programmes are linked to the economic priorities in the respective provinces of the youth service corps, who also go through extensive workplace practical training. This is a prerequisite for qualification as an artisan.
The future leaders also undergo character development and leadership training at the South African National Defence Force for a period of four months after being recruited into the programme.
The participants are then expected to perform community service in their respective communities.
To date, Nkwinti said about 14 000 youngsters have been enrolled in his department’s long-term programme.
In 2012, the recruitment drive for the youth programme was increased to recruit six youths per rural ward, with an emphasis on the Comprehensive Rural Development (CRDP) sites, where the numbers are more than 10 youths per CRDP site.
The participants in Narysec were also given opportunities when they completed training through the Rural Enterprise and Industrial Programme (REID), which aims to build sustainable rural economies.
Narysec gets headquarters
The graduation ceremony was preceded by the handing over of Thaba Nchu College of Education to the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform by Free State Premier Ace Magashule.
The college has now become the headquarters of the Narysec programme in the country and it will also be used as the permanent exhibition centre of the 1913 Land Act Exhibition.
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South Africa: Rural Life Upward Bound Winds of change are blowing over the country’s rural landscape with the National Rural Youth Service Corp Narysec set to change the development path of these areas by fighting unemployment Today saw 6 000 youths graduate from the four-year Narysec programme at Thaba Nchu College of Education in the Free State – a moment Rural Development and Land Reform Minister Gugile Nkwinti described as a turning point in rural life “… In the coming years we will be talking about a changed and different rural life in South Africa It is equally reasonable to predict that because our intervention of skilling and creating employment for our young people in our rural areas through Narysec is bearing fruit,” he said
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