unemployment

South Africa’s poor have headed government’s call to do it for themselves in the spirit of vukuzenzele. To millions of people affected by poverty and unemployment, the most obvious option to ‘do it for yourself’ is to start small business initiatives such as selling fruits and vegetables, clothes, fast food at a street corner, and operating ‘spaza’ shops.

We are here (still)
in this the last outpost
stuck in the dark with
folk believing (still) that
women belong at home

We are here (still)
all 50 or so million
in our seemingly different
and separate country apart
poles from one and all

We are here (still)
we with the native intelligence
of our parents and theirs before
sans the scraps of paper
certifying our daily worth

We are here (still)
in this very colony and that
along with the jobless poor

As South Africa's unemployment lines keep growing in its first post-apartheid recession, Johannesburg's downtown sidewalks are increasingly crowded with street vendors hawking their wares. This is according to spokesperson for the Ecumenical Service for Socioeconomic Transformation, Thabo Koole.

Koole points out that, "Informal trading is seen as a sign of underdevelopment and primitive -- a sign of weakness."

The United Nations (UN) has warned that the global economic crisis will likely hamper efforts to reach the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which, in part, are already lagging behind the targets.

Jobs provide self-respect, independence and fulfillment. Productive work is the bedrock of democracy and human development. South Africa needs jobs: it needs them more urgently than ever, and it needs them in the kind of numbers we have never created before. Towards the end of 2008, the Centre for Development and Enterprise and Business Leadership South Africa (BLSA) brought together some leading South Africans to think ‘out of the box’ about unemployment and creating a really large number of  new jobs so that every South African who needs a job will be able to find one.

Amid a furore over the news of a decline in South Africa's unemployment rate to 21.9 percent, Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) says that the lower rate is statistically correct.

Executive manager of Household Labour Market Statistics at Stats SA, Yandiswa Mpetsheni, points out that it is only construction growth of eight percent, 0.9 and 0.4 percent across the Quarterly Employment Statistics, Gross Domestic Product and quarter labour force survey that is statistically significant.