Statistics South Africa’s fourth quarter report for the previous financial year showed the Eastern Cape as the province with the highest rate of unemployment, at 42.1 percent.
To dent this high unemployment rate, at least 10 trainees, eight females and two males from the Nyandeni Local Municipality, have been given skills to employ themselves, after successfully graduating from a three-year bricklaying programme funded by the Department of Fisheries, Forestry and the Environment.
The municipality hosted a graduation ceremony to celebrate the milestone with the cohort on November 6, where the graduates were presented with their qualification certificates.
The main objective of the programme is to enrich young people with knowledge of building and construction.
Lusanda Maqambayi (27), one of the graduates of the bricklaying programme, says he learnt a lot from the programme and the facilitators gave them practical skills to be self-employed instead of waiting to be employed by someone else.
He further praised the programme for being multi-faceted and not only focusing on bricklaying, saying this helped secure him a job at one of the construction companies working on the upgrading of the N2 road between Dan’s Country Lodge and Tsolo where he is currently working.
The bricklayer programme began in 2018, initially envisaged to be nine months long, but was further extended to three years.
“I must say when I enrolled for the programme I took it for granted that we would only learn bricklaying, but was amazed at the multi-faceted training we received from our facilitators during the course of the training.”
“I will use the knowledge gained during the programme to look for job opportunities in the built environment, and my dream job is to be an inspector of newly-built structures,” said another graduate, Nocwaka Mzamo (38).
Graduates received monthly stipends from the Department of Fisheries, Forestry, and the Environment for the duration of their training.
