Saldanha Bay Municipality (SBM) is thinking out of the box when it comes to unemployment.
A stakeholders meeting was recently held in Vredenburg as part of SBM’s Social Helix program, an agreement with the School of Public Leadership (SPL) from Stellenbosch University, where the SPL introduced its Unemployment to Entrepreneurship (U2E) project.
This project takes unskilled workers and provides them with jobs that are linked to skills, so these workers can become skilled artisans, through an integrated system of SBM. The public will then be able to be hire these workers through a database run by SBM.
“We don’t want to glorify temporary work,” Prof Erwin Schwella of SPL stated. “These workers must become business ventures for private people.”
Some of the issues raised during the meeting included that the project needed to integrate with existing databases from government, social issues being a drawback, as well as the buy in from big businesses, who were absent at the meeting.
A consensus among attendees was that social issues needed to be addressed first.
Follow-up meetings, to establish the project, will happen in due course.
Interested parties can contact project leader Abé du Plessis on Abe.duPlessis@sbm.gov.za.
