Employment and Labour Minister Thulas Nxesi on April 4 announced that the Department of Employment and Labour (DEL) would be launching a new Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) Labour Activation Programme (LAP) to provide training for employment and entrepreneurship programmes.

He informed that R23.8-billion would be allocated to implement this plan. Opportunities will run for between 12 to 36 months.

Money invested in this plan would be recouped by the UIF through contributions and revenue generated from investments, Nxesi said, noting that there was precedent that showed that the fund was able to operate on this sustainable model basis.

The LAP would be rolled out in stages across the country's nine provinces, starting in Gauteng.

It will entail 333 recommended projects to provide training, small enterprise support and employment opportunities to hundreds of thousands of unemployed people and was not age-constrained.

Participants will either be trained to establish their own enterprises or have the opportunity to be employed post-training.

Nxesi said projects would be broken down into districts to ensure an even spread across each province.

The project will be launched over the coming weeks. Phase 1, the provincial rollout, will begin this Saturday, April 6, in Gauteng, at the Nasrec Expo, with 55 projects to be launched.

More information about these projects would be provided on the day, with an introduction to all of the service providers that would be providing training and employment opportunities, as well as how each project would work.

The highest-value project set to be launched on Saturday is one that will train service agents of call centres, targeting 15 000 people.

More information about how the programme will work and where people can apply will also be outlined. About 500 000 people are being targeted for the Gauteng rollout, it was highlighted.

The rest of the provincial rollout is as follows: KwaZulu-Natal on April 16, Western Cape on April 17, Eastern Cape on April 19, Free State on April 22, North West on April 23, Mpumalanga on April 24, Limpopo on April 30, and Northern Cape on May 9.

Nxesi said the DEL, with the UIF, would partner with provincial governments for these projects to ensure that government maximised the impact of its spending resources and eliminated duplication.

Phase 2, which would start on April 12, would entail collaboration between provinces to assist in merging projects, and with recruitment funding, building partnerships and reducing duplication.

Opportunities would be created in over 22 sectors, namely agriculture, services, construction, information and communications technology, wholesale and retail, safety and security, hospitality, social services, textile, transport, furniture manufacturing, education, energy, food and beverage, health and wellness, aviation, insuranc, jewellery, hygiene, arts and culture, and the financial sector.

Details of other launches and the impact to be delivered from the projects would be delivered on an ongoing basis, Nxesi said.

Nxesi said the LAP programme would build on the department’s employment mandate, by enhancing the employability of the unemployed through training, enabling entrepreneurship through enterprise development, preserving jobs, collaboration across government entities and departments to "massify" jobs, and skills training and enterprise development.

Nxesi assured that all the projects in the programme had been subjected to meticulous quality assurance processes to ensure they were compliant with policy and legislation. He added that all the necessary controls were in place to ensure that there was the requisite capacity and resources for these to produce real outcomes in terms of jobs and entrepreneurial skills.

In this vein, Nxesi explained that employability interventions were delivered through contracts with a condition that they guaranteed jobs for beneficiaries post the programme.

He said the UIF provided a sliding scale of funding support for the programme, which was that 70% of participants would be contributors, and a maximum of 30% would be non-contributors with 100% UIF funding.

Nxesi said the department elected to partner with the private sector to create thousands of employment opportunities, and as these programmes with different companies were finalised, they would be announced.

Nxesi noted that, while this was not the first LAP programme the department had undertaken to mitigate unemployment, it was the first of this large scale to be implemented.

He also noted that LAP programmes were not a “silver bullet” to end the challenge of unemployment, but that they were a viable force multiplier that could be used, together with other initiatives and interventions, as part of the response to mitigate this.