Cape Town - South Africa's skills problem remains massive, deputy president Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka said on Wednesday.
"The scale of the problem has become bigger in the interim. There's a need for us to up our game," she told a media briefing on the 2007 report of the joint initiative on priority skills acquisition (Jipsa).
Vacancies in the public sector were also still unacceptably high.
Further, public schools and university throughputs were still too low, the quality and availability of trainers were a major constraint and rural communities had inadequate access to education and skills opportunities.
Mlambo-Ngcuka said the global situation had changed since Jipsa's launch two years ago and the initiative had to be "upscaled".
Urgent attention also had to be given to foreign skills recruitment, because the country did not have the luxury of time for all the necessary training.
However, significant inroads had been made into increasing the number of artisans in training and current training levels were higher than originally expected.
It was hoped the Jipsa programme would train 50 000 artisans by 2010.
'Go back to school'
According to the report, the 2007/08 service levels agreements (SLAs) signed between the various sector education and training authorities (Setas) and the labour department, reflected a total of 18 879 artisans to be registered.
Provisional Seta SLAs indicated an additional 20 000 would be registered for 2008/09.
The national skills fund (NSF) allocated a further R300m for training 7 350 more artisans.
Among other things, the safety and security sector had also started a pilot project to determine the capacity of defence, police, and correctional services to train and assess artisans.
Regarding engineers, the report said the education department's enrolment planning forecast that total engineering graduations would rise by 500 a year to about 2000 a year by 2010.
Mlambo-Ngcuka said children had to be stopped from dropping out of school before reaching matric.
"[They must go back to school because they are swelling the ranks of the unemployed."
She said an agreement had been reached with the retail sector to help find work for those matriculants who did not want to go to university.
Sentiment 'positive' towards Africa
The cabinet established Jipsa in 2006 to support the government's initiative to accelerate economic growth, Asgisa. Asgisa's goals were reducing unemployment from 30% to 15% by 2014 and reducing poverty from one-third to one-sixth of the population by 2014.
It was also aimed at increasing GDP growth rate from an average of three to 4.5% per annum between 2005 and 2009, to 6% a year for the period 2010 to 2014.
Alan Hirsch, head of the economic sector in the Presidency, said there was no reason to believe these targets would not be met.
Anglogold Ashanti's Bobby Godsell, a member of Jipsa's task team, was optimistic about Africa's prospects in the current global economic climate.
"A large part of the developed world is heading for recession... in the next five to 10 years real growth will happen in emerging markets. Africa has never been more positively received."
Having recently returned from a trip to the USA, he said he had never seen a sentiment "as positive" towards Africa and predicted that engineers who had emigrated would start returning.
South Africa had a sound financial services sector, it was less indebted than most of the rich parts of the world and had a healthier set of economic fundamentals.
"That's what's going to start bringing people back," he said.