The National Skills Development Strategy: a new institutional regime for skills formation in post-apartheid South Africa

Abstract

this chapter provides a detailed overview of the South African Government's new National Skills Development Strategy (NSDS), which was formally launched in February 2001. The new strategy replaces the narrow, short-termist and voluntarist model of enterprise training which predominated during the apartheid period with a new framework based on: greater co-ordination and planning; greater stakeholder consensus; and improved funding arrangements which cede to the state and the new Sectoral Education and Training Authorities (SETAs) real leverage over the direction of training initiatives. The chapter is primarily a detailed descriptive exposition if the new training policy. This is intentionally so given the almost total absence of any other academic writing on the NSDS. However the analysis is not purely descriptive, because it interprets many of the features of the NSDS as having much in common with some of the key characteristics of high skills systems elsewhere in the world.