How can Joburg create inner-city jobs when Covid money ends?

Mawere Taona says he never had time to get mixed up with drugs in Johannesburg’s crime-ridden inner city — he was far too busy getting addicted to basketball.

His love of the sport was nurtured through local charity Boundless City, which maintains local courts and organises practices, one of dozens of social projects to benefit from a fund established by SA’s presidency in late 2020.

“Basketball became my drug, a drug that taught me discipline,” the 28-year-old project manager for the organisation said while shooting hoops as a group of children looked on.

Inner-city Johannesburg was once a commercial hub for large mining companies seeking riches in SA’s biggest city, but decades of neglect and disinvestment have left residents facing high levels of crime and poverty.

From Seoul in South Korea to Chile in Santiago, governments, private investors and charities have also sought to revive degraded urban areas to make them safer places to work and live in, with varying degrees of success.

Johannesburg’s latest inner-city projects, supported by the presidential post-Covid employment stimulus, range from funding informal street book sellers promoting African literature to agricultural projects run by the homeless.

The national employment stimulus has pushed about R32.6bn to more than 1-million people either through jobs or internships around the country, according to government statistics.

Johannesburg Inner City Partnership (JICP), the body facilitating the funding to the inner-city groups, has helped channel R25m to about 40 organisations such as Boundless City that are creating safe spaces to play and learn. The projects have created an estimated 2,000 part-time jobs since November last year, almost 70% of which have gone to youth in the area and 60% to women, JICP said.

Nationwide, the presidential employment stimulus (PES) has boosted the largest youth employment programme in SA’s history, said Kate Philip, the PES lead.

Despite the initiative’s success in creating jobs and cleaning up public spaces in the neglected inner city, funding is not guaranteed beyond 2024, forcing charities to rethink the longevity of their projects.

“If the funding runs out we won’t be able to continue the work we’ve been doing,” said Taona.

But the funding uncertainty is also pushing organisations to invest in skills that can help the newly employed find jobs after the presidential cash dries up, said Catherine Deacon, JICP operations manager.

Municipal neglect

Johannesburg’s inner-city streets bustle with commuters who weave between street vendors selling everything from wigs to hot meals on pavements in front of heritage buildings and degenerating high-rise apartment blocks. But the area is also known for frequent muggings and municipal neglect evidenced through burst water pipes and piles of trash.

In central Johannesburg, there were 1,054 “contact crimes”, such as rape, murder and assault from January to March this year alone, police data shows.

About 33% of South Africans are jobless, making it the country with one of the world’s highest unemployment rates, according to the IMF.

The PES programme was announced in October 2020 when President Cyril Ramaphosa pledged to create much-needed jobs after losses during the pandemic. Funds for all PES programmes terminate in March 2024, with any possibility of continuation now being assessed by the National Treasury, Philip said.

The inner-city funding is designed to support dozens of “hero organisations in civil society”, she said. These include Clean City SA, a waste reduction and recycling charity, Water for the Future — a river cleanup project, and Sport for Social Change, which provides after-school sports training and lessons in life skills.

“Apartheid spatial planning means marginalised groups often live far from where they work, they spend a lot of time and money getting to jobs,” Deacon said.

“These participants work where they live so they are reaping the benefits,” she said, adding that inner-city property owners report noticing cleaner and safer streets.

But such government interventions are not meant to be long-term solutions to tackling unemployment, said Lauren Graham, director of the University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Social Development in Africa. “They’re meant to be work opportunities that allow an individual to gain skills and a better foothold in the labour market,” she said.

Even if short-lived, these programmes help “de-risk” youth unlikely to get jobs without previous work experience, Philip said.

JICP also points to examples of innovation by the local charities they help fund that will hopefully ensure their sustainability.

Water for the Future, for example, has secured training for 110 staff members to undergo permaculture and aquaponic lessons through the University of Johannesburg, with each participant gifted gardening tools and equipment.

They are also selling firewood and woven screens made from invasive plants to secure alternative forms of income and are seeking funding from other sources.

The Johannesburg Homelessness Network has trained dozens of individuals to farm and sell their produce to shelters in order to pay rent and get off the streets.

Many beneficiaries have gone on to find more permanent work elsewhere, Deacon said, showing how the presidential funding creates a “domino effect”.

Romy Stander, founder of Water for the Future, said it was about “getting people’s confidence back”. “We’re investing in people so they can keep growing even if the funding runs out,” she said.

Thomson Reuters Foundation