Tau said the City was working towards unlocking the potential of young people simply by recognising their value and helping them find their path to economic and social participation.
On the need to capacitate the youth Tau said, “We will assist the estimated one-million young people in Joburg who are not in employment, education, or training – we need to do this on a mass scale.”
He said the City was to roll out the Vulindle’ (Open the Road) eJozi programme, which is an innovative response to the massive problem of youth unemployment.
There would be a focus on youth in the coming year, he said, with the rollout of the programme aimed at creating jobs and opportunities for 200 000 youngsters by 2016. The City entered into a partnership with Harambee Youth Accelerator, a youth social development enterprise started by the private sector to drive the first year of the programme.
It would begin with screening, assessment and advisory services for candidates. This would be followed by foundation literacy, numeracy and digital literacy. He also said the City would focus on education, in which Tau said research showed that only 13.2 percent of Joburg residents had a post-matric qualification.
“The challenge is mobility up the higher education ladder. To address this, the City is using the Massive Open Online Varsity to encourage people to get online qualifications,” he said.
Tau said another focus was going to be the expansion of free public wi-fi hotspots across the city. The City was in the process of ‘blanketing Braamfontein with wi-fi’ which would provide high-speed broadband access.
“We have 4.8-million people in the city, but 50 percent do not have regular access to the Internet. Digital access is becoming as much of an equality issue in our society as access to water and electricity,” Tau said.
Tau, who invited the Joburg Migrant Advisory Panel to the event, said the City did not regard urbanisation as an obstacle but rather as an opportunity. “Our diversity is a source of strength and social cohesion, [and is] a building block for community growth,” he said.
Tau said all citizens must fight back with clearly-voiced reason against the toxic falsehood that economic opportunity is limited, and that migrants deprive local people by participating in the local economy.
“Migrants who come here to work, build businesses and offer services [which] are unambiguously good for the City,” Tau said.
