Cape Town - As this year’s Youth Day is commemorated under a cloud of record unemployment levels among the country’s young, some youths are demonstrating the significance of self-sustainability to create better lives for themselves.
About 9 to 10 million young people of working age are currently unemployed, with youth unemployment described as another pandemic at a staggering 66.5%.
June marks the historical national Youth Month, which is being commemorated under the banner “Promoting sustainable livelihood and resilience of young people for a better tomorrow”.
This year marks the 46th anniversary of the June 16 1976 student uprising in Soweto when young people protested against the imposition of Afrikaans by the apartheid regime as a medium of instruction.
The uprising ended with hundreds of youth being killed.
As the government has been unable to help turn the tide against youth unemployment, Mawande Sigwinta from Strand is on a quest, through his organic food farm I-Afrikayam, to inspire other young people to find ways to participate in the economy.
In 2020, 31-year-old Sigwinta was among the young people who were tallied in the unemployed youth statistics.
However, while this hit him hard, it also became a blessing in disguise as it afforded him the chance to invest his time and energy to start a vegetable garden in his Zola community.
“Unemployment has been on the rise since around 2015 and graduates at that time were complaining about job scarcity, but the pandemic heightened the situation.
“I think the education system is lacking in preparing us to sustain ourselves. While education is paramount, there are few individuals who use the skills they obtain, for example in the agriculture and hospitality industries, to also start their own businesses.
“For science and chemistry students, it's rare to find a student using those skills to start an initiative, hence when they lose their jobs it becomes hard,” he said.
Knowing this as a person who studied chemistry at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT), Sigwinta identified a need in his community to provide nutritious and quality food to patients on chronic medication at his local clinic.
And so, I-Afrikayam farm was born.
“As young people our mindsets need to change. Most youth still perceive agriculture as a field for uneducated and poor people. We cannot only just look to the government because clearly they don’t have a plan. I started I-Afrikayam, read books, used YouTube and asked people questions because I didn’t have agricultural expertise. I received minimal funding, which assisted with growing the initiative.”
To remain self-sustainable he started selling packaged and unpackaged vegetables to the informal market.
“Today we also run a restaurant, where we sell meals that are prepared from our harvested vegetables. The main idea is to really inspire young people, especially graduates, to start similar projects,” said Sigwinta.
He said while the townships were riddled with crime, they were still a place to start.
“Every business has risks. In my opinion you can't run away from starting something because you are afraid of what might happen.”
For 26-year-old Sisanda Tshesu who has been unemployed for six months, she had to relocate to George after failing to receive any response to her applications for a teaching post.
“I stayed in Kraaifontein with my family and studied at CPUT. We were supposed to graduate last December but then the event was moved to April. I’ve been looking for opportunities since January. Even finding an internship, so that I have that work experience, has been hard.
“My relatives who live in George invited me to stay there and that is where I received a temporary assistance job at a local school. It is very frustrating to apply to many places using money you don’t have and your application is not even acknowledged,” she said.
Cape Times