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Catch up with the latest on BizNews.com
- Grace Harding – creating a collective to fight for restauranteurs
- Meet township baking mogul Refiloe Rantekoa – with GG Alcock
- Goals for life. Portia Modise’s journey of footballing glory
- CrypTalk ep 5: NFTs – overpriced pictures or future of contracting?
- Keep calm and lap up the warm weather
- Antony Blinken visits Africa, vying with Russia for favor (Premium)
- When Cy Jacobs met Markus Jooste – inside track to spotting fraudsters (Premium)
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Clem Sunter’s urging puts Refiloe into the spotlight – again
SA’s globally respected futurist Clem Sunter would like the country’s president to resuscitate his televised ‘family meetings’ that were a regular feature of the Covid pandemic. But with a very different focus.
Clem reckons we have an even bigger crisis in the economy and in the creation of jobs (more accurately, lack of). And unless Pretoria starts to get serious about embracing the solution, SA’s unemployment hole is sure to keep getting deeper.
Sunter’s recommended ‘family meetings’ would focus on what progress the nation is making in growing entrepreneurs – and publicly celebrating the best of these job creators, the hardy business builders whose efforts offer the only path to a prosperous future.
At Clem’s suggestion, we asked informal market guru GG Alcock to help us feature a monthly township entrepreneurial star. First up is bakery tycoon Refiloe Rantekoa. His fascinating story has been covered by global media – but little recognised in a country where political connections open doors, ability not so much. Click here to watch.
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Comment from BizNews community member Steuart Pennington:
Hi Alec,
I thoroughly enjoyed the interview with Refiloe Rantekoa, and I agree with your sentiments regarding ‘family meetings’ and celebrating entrepreneurship, sometimes against the odds. But I think it equally important, if not more important, to be getting a message to our schools around the issue of ‘employability’. As you may know I work in a number of rural schools in the Midlands, just last week I interviewed 33 Grade 12 pupils at Asithuthuke Combined School in Balgowan one-on-one to review their trial matric results, and get them fired up for revision and their matric. I ended off each interview with the question ‘what do you want to do next year?’ Just about all want to go to university, when about four have any chance. And their ‘career aspirations’ are off the charts.
If these kids were challenged from Grade 8 as to what will make them ‘employable’ the answers might have been very different, but they are not. Sadly, very few have any idea about what’s out there in terms of further education and employment opportunity. We have to fix this.
You may be interested to what I wrote to the CDE recently on this topic.
Presently I work in a number of rural, marginalized schools, firstly, the current curriculum is becoming increasingly inappropriate for the changing world of work and secondly, the aspirations of learners is very disconnected from their academic performance, potential and ability. The crucial issue is employability, what do we need to do to improve every school leavers chances of becoming employable? My sense is that in Grade 8 (Std. 6) children should be streamed into four possible categories: (i) academic with real University potential (25% of kids) (ii) vocational with tertiary diploma potential (25%) (iii) Technical with apprenticeship potential (25%) (iv) Craft with basic hands-on training potential. (This his more or less the practice in many developed economies) If every child over 18 had a drivers license and the potential to develop a skill in one of the four categories above, and we had improving economic growth, many more of our youth would find employment. Govt. and the DoE need to wake up to the fact that employability is the crucial measure, not a ‘matric’, and that will only happen if we change the current moribund approach to education.
With 7000 secondary schools in the country, 80% of which are ‘under-resourced’; 500 000 school leavers each year, of which a max. of 200 000 will enter any form of tertiary education, the importance of this ‘employability’ message is critical.