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24 March 2020

Media Release: SANParks Hosts Youth Summit To Empower South African Youth

South African National Park (SANParks) opens its inaugural SANParks Youth Summit in Port Elizabeth today (14 March 2020). The Summit will help identify innovative and new growth opportunities within the parks, identify funding opportunities, identify key areas for entrepreneurial development and support for the youth. This according to SANParks, Chief Executive Officer Fundisile Mketeni, who said a total number of 200 youth in business from across the country have been invited to the Summit to learn more about SANParks and business opportunities within the organisation.

He said SANParks, recognises the important role it can play in shaping the South African economy and its contribution towards addressing the overall youth unemployment. “We envisage a youth-led wildlife economy and tourism industry through youth based inclusive training, work-based exposure placement programs and enterprise developmental models that will be driven through innovation and technological best practices to solve the problems of today, by paving a brighter future.”

Mketeni said this important event would also see a signing of a Memorandum of Understanding with the National Youth Development Agency (NYDA). “This will ensure that we streamline our resources accordingly and enable results driven programmes with a view of allowing the youth to tap into economic benefits attached to our national parks.”

On the side-line of the inaugural SANParks Youth Summit, Mketeni launched SANParks Youth Desk with an objective of giving youth the opportunity to actively participate in SANParks business such as procurement, maintenance, development and operations of facilities, partnerships, training, experiential learning and mentorship to mention but a few.

“We hope to see a 30% increase in the participation of youth and woman owned businesses in the next 5 years, 100 youth, women and people with disability owned SMMEs supported every year for the next 5 years and 200 going through training and experiential learning,” concluded Mketeni.

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Issued by:

South African National Parks (SANParks) Corporate Communications:

Tel: 012 426 5170

Enquiries:

Reynold “Rey” Thakhuli: SANParks Acting Head of Communications
Tel: 012 426 5203
Cell: 073 373 4999 or
email: [email protected]

Editor’s note:

The signing of the memorandum of understanding with NYDA will:

  • Provide technical advisory services on youth development matters;
  • Assist with content that will assist the development of an inclusive youth strategy;
  • Implement jointly with SANParks youth development programmes/interventions for the benefit of the youth of South Africa;
  • Provide a suite of business support to qualifying youth in line with the NYDA policies and processes;
  • Provide grant funding to qualifying youth in partnership with SANParks, in line with the NYDA policies and processes.