Bleak stats for black, coloured youth

Cape Town. 140330. Thandi Bam runs back to her friend after having locked up the toilet. Informal settlements like Mkhaza still use cement flush toilets. The area around the toilets are often used by kids as play areas resulting in diseases spreading easily. Reporter Jason Felix. Picture COURTNEY AFRICA

Cape Town. 140330. Thandi Bam runs back to her friend after having locked up the toilet. Informal settlements like Mkhaza still use cement flush toilets. The area around the toilets are often used by kids as play areas resulting in diseases spreading easily. Reporter Jason Felix. Picture COURTNEY AFRICA

Published Apr 19, 2016

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Cape Town - South Africa faces a “cocktail of disasters” as a disproportionate number of black and coloured youth remained unemployed, correlating with figures which also showed the two groups had the worst higher education attainment.

Statistician-General Pali Lehohla, presenting a study on the social profile of the youth between 2009 and 2014, said the growth in the youth population was 6 percent while that of the general population stood at 6.9 percent.

He said the fertility rate of 2.5 children per woman was four points away from 2.1 where the population replaced itself. Replacement is when the birth rate equals or exceeds the death rate.

“We are very close to replacement, and if you are so close to replacement and your youth population is decreasing as a proportion, a consequence of that decline is an unemployed youth. The combination of that is a cocktail of disasters because then you have missed the youth dividend,” said Lehohla.

The Stats SA study also showed the number of blacks, as a proportion of the population, completing bachelor’s degrees was at its highest point in 1990. This while Indians and whites had dramatically increased their proportion of youth with bachelor degrees in the late 1990s.

Lehohla said the percentage of the population who were 35 and above was growing at a much faster pace.

Because they made up a smaller percentage of the population, youth unemployment had decreased to 39.8 from 46.6 percent in the five-year period.

Youth unemployment was strongly linked to those who had not completed matric, with 57 percent without a job, compared to 38 percent who had completed matric, 4 percent who had received some form of tertiary education, and only 1 percent of graduates were unemployed.

The percentage of workers in skilled occupations had increased in all race and age groups, except for black Africans aged 25-34, for which it decreased, with less than 20 percent of this age group in skilled occupations.

Youth between the ages of 16 and 34 were twice more likely to have experienced assault and robbery than those in the next age category.

Those aged between 16 and 24 were most likely to have been victims of assault and property crime, while 25- to 34-year-olds were most likely to experience robbery.

Youth deaths had decreased from 21.1 percent in 2008 to 16.4 in 2013, with most deaths due to “TB, HIV, viral and intestinal diseases”, followed by car accidents and murder. And young people were more likely to die in KwaZulu-Natal, the Eastern Cape and Gauteng.

The study also found that youth in the Western Cape were unlikely to migrate to other provinces, with 91.3 percent remaining in the province, followed by 88.3 percent of those in Gauteng and 88.4 percent in KZN.

The Eastern Cape lost more of its youth to other provinces, with the biggest beneficiaries being Gauteng and the Western Cape.

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