Following the release of the latest Quarterly Labour Force Survey for the last Quarter of 2022, Kristal Duncan Williams, Project Lead at Youth Capital, spoke to Lester Kiewit on Good Morning Cape Town to comment on the marginal drop in unemployment. Kristal reflected on how the numbers don’t show that any of the country’s interventions are working.
The needle isn’t shifting fast enough and the slight drop doesn’t translate into lives being changed; the scale of the number requires us to think innovatively, and we’re not streamlining funds with a matter of urgency. The Budget Speech didn’t communicate that urgency, and didn’t mention young people not even once. We need to to urgently promote growth-enhancing measures’
Youth Capital’s Project Lead
When Lester asked about the number of crisis South Africa is facing, Kristal contextualised the youth unemployment crisis with an eye to the future of the country.
What we need to keep remembering is that the problem of youth unemployment is our greatest challenge because we’re setting ourselves up for future failure. The majority of South African’s population is young people; if we don’t get young people into work, what is our country going to be in the next ten years? Tackling youth unemployment is not just about young people, it’s about the future of this country
Kristal Duncan-Williams
