Developing a Multidimensional Youth Employability Index to unpack vulnerabilities in the lived realities of youth in Post-apartheid South Africa

Evelien Storme, Ariane De Lannoy, Murray Leibbrandt, Filip De Boeck and Gibson Mudiriza
Additional contact information
Evelien Storme: The Institute for Anthropological Research in Africa (IARA), KU Leuven
Ariane De Lannoy: Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town
Filip De Boeck: The Institute for Anthropological Research in Africa (IARA), KU Leuven

No 255, SALDRU Working Papers from Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town

Abstract: Employability, understood as the ability to gain, sustain, and move on in employment, depends on and shapes circumstances in a young person's lifeworld. In a Post-apartheid South Africa individual attributes as well as vulnerabilities in the young person's home and neighbourhood all impact on labour outcomes. We develop a multidimensional youth employability index to capture this complexity following the Alkire and Foster method. We use the Census 2011 data. The results show that various forms of networks in the youth's household and neighbourhood make a stronger contribution to their employability than do the individual's attributes such as education, despite the latter's prominence in the employability literature. There is a strong geographical component to employability and results are highly differentiated across municipalities. It matters greatly whether youth are in formal or informal work, have become discouraged or are unemployed and looking for a job when it comes to being employability deprived. However, large proportions of employed youth are employability deprived and lived realities at the lower end of the labour market are very similar with or without a job. Our results therefore demonstrate the usefulness of an expanded view on youth employability as it is able to unpack hardships that remain masked when using "employment" as a single indicator for youth's socio-economic inclusion into the labour market.

Keywords: livelihood; youth; employability; employment; South Africa; multidimensional (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://opensaldru.uct.ac.za/handle/11090/971 Full text (application/pdf)

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:ldr:wpaper:255

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SALDRU Working Papers from Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Alison Siljeur ().