Evaluation of the youth development programme at Swartland Municipality

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT:Swartland Municipality is situated in the West Coast of the Western Cape Provinceas one of the thirty municipalities in the province. Swartland Municipality, like othermunicipalities, is faced with socio-economic challenges such as crime,unemployment and low levels of education. although the unemployment rate is not sohigh when compared with some of the municipalities in the province, Swartlandamongst other challenges is faced with the problem of access to tertiary education.As a result the agricultural sector dominates as the main economic activity.As part of the effort to address some of its socio-economic challenges, SwartlandMunicipality's Youth Development programme was established in partnership withUmsobomvu Youth Fund and named Youth Advisory Centre (YAC). It wasestablished mainly to uplift the living conditions of youth in Swartland by assistingthem with career guidance advice, CV writing, and to start own businesses. Toachieve this two officials were employed, one as Career Guidance Advisor, and theother one as an Outreach Officer. These two officials had the same duties but theOutreach Officer was appointed mainly to bring services to Swartland areas whichare far from where the Youth Advisory Centre is located.However, to ensure that the programme achieves its goals, programme evaluationhas to be carried out. Programme evaluation assists in determining the programme'sshortcomings and the areas that need improvement. In this study programmeevaluation has been carried out to determine if what is planned gets implemented,and the extent to which programme plans are achieved. In doing so, the researcherused the YAC's plans, reports, Swartland Municipality annual reports and held semistructuredinterviews with two senior officials of Swartland Municipality who areinvolved in the YAC and with the two appointed YAC officials mentioned above.These data collection instruments provided the researcher with the information onwhat the YAC planned and what it achieved from July 2006 to April 2009. Theresearcher analysed this data and found that not all YAC plans and reports wereavailable and some contradictions existed in targets between YAC plans, theMemorandum of Agreement (MOA) between Swartland Municipality andUmsobomvu, and Swartland Municipality's Annual reports. Despite these findings, itwas found that the YAC plans correspond with the YAC results reported; thereforethe YAC has been implementing its plans. Although the YAC did not meet all of itstargets, the difference between the planned outputs and achieve outputs was not big.On the basis of these findings, the researcher recommended that there should be anintegrated planning process to set up YAC's performance standards and the YAChas to improve its performance in most of its key outputs, especially in supporting theyouth in business development and opportunities.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University