Public works programme and primary health care in South Africa: Creating jobs for health systems strengthening?

Olagoke Akintola

Development Southern Africa, 2015, vol. 32, issue 5, 623-638

Abstract: This paper examines employment and skills training for community caregivers within the expanded public works programme in South Africa. The paper argues that, as currently conceptualised, the skills and learnership programmes for community caregivers fail to take full advantage of the prevailing labour market realities. Therefore, the paper argues for strategic reconceptualisation of the programme to include learnerships for community caregivers that impart more mid-level to higher-level skills to meet current and future labour market demands particularly in primary health care. This, it is argued, will address the scarcity of skills in the health sector of the economy. Furthermore, the proposed programme will simultaneously have positive impacts on unemployment, the primary health care system and the socio-economic well-being of community caregivers.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/0376835X.2015.1044073 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:deveza:v:32:y:2015:i:5:p:623-638

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CDSA20

DOI: 10.1080/0376835X.2015.1044073

Access Statistics for this article

Development Southern Africa is currently edited by Marie Kirsten

More articles in Development Southern Africa from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().