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By SIFISO DLAMINI | 2024-10-20
The Ministry of Labour and Social Security says the decision to stop sponsoring the field of Humanities was informed by the National Skills Audit of 2022, which revealed that the graduates are unemployable.
The report, according to the ministry, also revealed that the elasticity of employment to growth appeared constrained by structural factors.
The decision, which comes into effect from the 2025/26 academic year, was announced on Tuesday and only affects students at the University of Eswatini (UNESWA).
Minister of Labour and Social Security, Phila Buthelezi, said the skills audit outlined the opportunities and saturations in terms of human resource.
The minister revealed that Humanities graduates approached the ministry and complained that they were not employable unless they had a Post Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE), hence the reason to phase out the programme.
He further said the ministry had been assessing priority courses and determined that some of them had to be phased out because they were no longer relevant.
He also pointed out that during the graduation, the Vice Chancellor Justice Thwala, announced about 10 new courses that would be introduced in the next accademic year, which was also part and parcel of the recommendations outlined in the skills audit report.
“We are also in the process of aligning with the industry needs,” the minsiter said.
When making the announcement, the minister said the decision to stop funding Humanities was part of a broader re-evaluation of government priorities in tertiary education funding.
He said while the Post Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) would continue to be funded for the 2024/25 academic year, funding for this programme would be phased out by the end of the 2028/29 academic year.
The ministry recently compiled priority programmes of study to be funded by the government of Eswatini through the Pre- Service Tertiary Education And Training (PTET) programme.
UNESWA Vice Chancellor, Professor Thwala said they welcomed the decision but highlighted that there was a need for more engagements between the university, the Ministry of Labour and Social Security, as well as the Ministry of Education and Training to forge a way forward.
Thwala said annually there were between 120 and 150 graduates under the Humanities programme, meaning over the past 10 years, for instance, there were between 1 200 and 1 500 graduates, a majority of whom were unemployed.
“We are looking forward to the Ministry of Labour to interact with the Ministry of Education and Training to forge the right way forward,” he said.
Thwala said as an institution, they felt it was the right time to start engaging on the matter because there were many graduates who were currently unemployed, which necessitated the need to consider enterprise development
Professor Thwala said as a university, they were training graduates not only to be absorbed in the local labour force but also globally. He said the institution was in the process of reviewing the programmes to be more inclined to professions that were in demand in the labour market.
He said some of the new programmes offered at the institution included performance arts, medical humanities, digital humanities, psychotherapy and philosophy.
The vice chancellor admitted that there was a need to be more practical in phasing out the Humanities programme, not only to produce graduates who wanted to be employed but graduates who would create employment for others.
Thwala said the decision to stop funding the programme was not only informed by the local skills audit but also the Southern African Development Community’s (SADC) skills audit, which looks at which skills were currently lacking in the region.
The National Skills Audit revealed that there was a large skill mismatches in the labour market, particularly for higher education skills, leading to poor absorbtion into the labour market, low productivity and poor job creation opportunities.
The ministry stated that reforms in the country’s skills development efforts could support increase in the elasticity of employment to economic growth, and addressing skill mismatches and human capital development could potentially improve long-term growth and employment dynamics.
“To this end the Ministry of Labour and Social Security, through the National Skills Audit 2022, has identified skills/ human development areas that government needs to focus on for economic growth and identified priority programmes to be sponsored between the years 2023 to 2027.”
The areas of human resource skills development for the country are categorised into 11, being Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) thematic areas, which include natural sciences, engineering and technology, medical and health sciences, agricultural science, economics and business, information communication and technology, STEM education, social sciences, tourism and hospitality, environmental sciences and manufacturing and general industry.
The ministry added that under education, the need to spur reforms in this sector could not be overstated. The ministry stated that ensuring the right and market-applicable skills and knowledge were being imparted to the right people was of huge importance to preventing a skills gap.
The ministry also stated that investments in blended learning and novel instructional solutions would yield tremendous dividends.
Although people associated humanities with unemployment, a certain section of the public feels the opposite, finding humanities to be the core essence of a society, and now students who are passionate about learning humanities are robbed of an opportunity to pursue their passion, said a concerned parent.
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