South Africa needs more youth owned businesses. According to National Youth Development Agency (NYDA), to date, 241,000+ youths received Business Support Development Services, and 29,000+ jobs created from that assistance.
The NYDA is a South African-based agency established primarily to tackle challenges that the nation’s youth are faced with. The NYDA was established by an Act of parliament, Act no 54 of 2008. The agency derives its mandate from legislative frameworks such as the NYDA Act (54 of 2008), the National Youth Policy (2009-2014) and the draft Integrated Youth Development Strategy as adopted by the Youth Convention of 2006.
The institution was established to be a single, unitary structure, established to address youth development issues at National, Provincial and Local government level. The existence of the NYDA should be located within the broad context of South Africa’s development dynamics. Like many developing countries, South Africa has a large population of youth, those between the ages 14-35 represent 42% of the total population.
The focus of the NYDA’s business will still be informed by imperatives of youth development as contained in the NYP, 2015 -2020, which are:
Economic Participation: To assist and facilitate youth participation in the economy, leading to improvement of their livelihoods through NYDA grants as financial support and non –financial support interventions. The aim is to respond to the challenges of youth unemployment and low total entrepreneurship activity among youth.
Education and Skills Development: To promote access to quality education and skills, to both school-going and out of school youth, through targeted interventions. The NDP outlines South Africa’s education vision to ensure that, by 2030, South Africans have access to education and training of the highest standard possible, producing significantly improved learning outcomes.
Nation–Building & Social Cohesion: To promote the implementation of the NYS across all race and class groups. Policy and research: To create and produce youth development information and knowledge that informs the public sector, private sector and civil society on developing policy, and the planning, implementation and review of all (100%) of their programmes related to government priorities.
Governance and administration: To provide effective IT systems, business processes and human resources (HR) capacity development, as well as improving the operations of the NYDA; and to ensure that all NYDA systems and processes support NYDA products.
Source: NYDA
