Chairperson, hon Ministers Patel and Davies, Deputy Ministers, my fellow MECs and colleagues in this esteemed House, it is an honour to be part of this budget policy debate today. Thank you very much.
I agree with the Minister regarding Outcome 4. For us in the provincial government of the Western Cape, our Strategic Objective 1 is aligned to Outcome 4, which is, in short, about growth and jobs. I should perhaps expand by saying that our goal is to create a Western Cape that is a better place for all in which to invest, make a profit, do business, get a job and earn a living. I also want to agree with much of what was said by the Deputy Minister who spoke before me. However, I want to say that when we talk about tackling unemployment we need to set ourselves some really big and hairy targets - if I may put it that way. We need to set ourselves targets that drive what we do every single day. When we wake up in the morning, those targets must be what we are after.
I will tell you what we have set ourselves as a target in regard to unemployment in the Western Cape. We have said we want to reduce our unemployment rate by 2% each year over the next three years. That is a very progressive target. It is not going to be an easy target to reach and we will have to work day and night to achieve it, but I promise you that that is when we start to make a difference to the people of our province.
Today I will highlight some of the areas where we specifically worked very well with both the departments and the Ministers, but I will also take the opportunity to highlight some of the areas we need to look at. Perhaps we should call them "risk areas".
First of all, and following on from what the Minister said about the amount of investment coming into South Africa, I think that is what we really have to work on. Regarding our provincial investment target, we are very happy with the R8,71 billion we managed to attract, some of it with your help, Ministers. That "help" refers to the incentives that we receive via the DTI and also to business process outsourcing, BPO, which the Minister spoke about. That is one of the areas where we are seeing great growth in regard to our provincial targets. In fact, we have seen growth of 1 200 percentage points. We set ourselves a target of R250 million inward investment last year, and our latest figures show investment worth just over R1 billion. As you know, that then talks to many, many jobs in that sector. I think you mentioned some of the names - the likes of Bloomberg and Amazon. That really helps to create a platform that we can brag about and helps us to attract further investment. The Minister also spoke about Kimberly-Clark, which brings us to manufacturing jobs, and I agree with that too.
Then we have the Saudi Basic Industries Corporation, or Sabic, and the Qatar Petrochemical Company opening offices here, so we are also looking at how we are projecting ourselves in regard to oil and gas. All of this translates into thousands of jobs and we are very grateful for the support that we get through the departments. I thank you very much.
I want to get to the IDZs, which have been mentioned. There is good collaboration here between local, provincial and national government. I want to use this platform to thank the department for working with us on this programme and for cofunding this programme so far. I give you my word that we are working as hard as we can to finish our process. I have already seen the draft Cabinet submission that has to come to us by 31 May so that we can keep to our agreement of making sure that the process gets handed back to the department in time for the Minister to get it through to the national Cabinet by the end of the year. We will stick to those targets.
However, Minister, I must also say that in this space there are one or two areas of risk and I must highlight them. We all know about the Universal Africa Lines project. I am very grateful for the speed with which it was addressed and for the processes that have led up to the attempts to resurrect this investment. However, my question is about the message we give when we - in this case, specifically Transnet - seem to be a bit slow in supporting these investments coming from outside the country. Before we even get the IDZs or SEZs in place, we are giving negative messages. It really does not help us to try to crowd in further investment. But enough said on that project, because I think a lot of work is being done to try to fix it.
Another point of risk is water and electricity. I think we have a good plan for water but I would like to ask for further help regarding electricity. We need to look specifically at offshore gas. We recently saw the buy-out of the Ibhubesi gas field. I think that is a very positive move because, especially in this region, we need to use these buy-outs and these companies' positioning themselves to help us balance our renewable energy, like wind and solar. Gas is the perfect balancing medium. I think I have mentioned before that we already have a gas turbine at Atlantis. However, when Eskom needs that power, it uses up to R750 million's worth of diesel a week. That is at about R7,87 or R7,90 per kilowatt hour, which is really expensive electricity, especially if it has to run for a whole day at a time. We can bring that down to about 90c per kilowatt hour if we get gas running the turbine. Right there is the first lever to help us with gas. Gas will then help us to crowd in further investment, specifically into Saldanha Bay. Gas can also offer us huge advantages with beneficiation because we know that beneficiation will draw a lot of electricity.
I want to move on to another area that we are busy working on in the province, namely skills. I think this is a national problem that we need to work very hard on. If we want to grow our economy, we need to make sure that we have the right skills to allow for such investment. I would like to highlight one or two projects. One that my department is working on is called the Premier's Advancement of Youth project, known as the Pay project. This project focuses on 1 000 matriculants who left school last year and have not managed to find work. We have pulled them in across all departments in a learnership capacity and we have them working for the next year. We have already assigned 747 students to these posts. Also, crosscutting Strategic Objective 1: Creating Opportunities for Growth and Jobs, we have already processed 174 000 people through the Expanded Public Works Programme project. I want to highlight two other projects that we are working on. One is called CapaCITi 1 000. You have seen the Adcorp numbers that talk about 650 000 graduates in South Africa who cannot find work and 850 000 posts, both in government and the private sector, which we cannot fill because we have a mismatch of skills. We started the programme called CapaCITi 1 000 because we found that in the finance sector in this region companies were importing business analyst services from India. We found a gap and partnered with one of our universities, with the businesses concerned and with the department. We advertised a trial run of 30 graduates that we would take and realign as business analysts. One year ago, these students were unemployed. One year later, with and through this partnership of realigning these graduates, they are earning an average of R16 700 a month as a starting salary. We think that is a really great project and are looking at how we can ramp it up and roll it out in other areas where there are demands for specific key graduate posts. We want to align our universities in this region with these specific demands.
The next project is a work and skills project. We call it Work and Skills for 100 000 but it really is a youth wage subsidy. We have been running it for two years now and have assigned R30 million to the budget. We have put 2 370 young people through the programme. We give a stipend of R1 000 a month, and the companies we partner with have agreed in a memorandum of understanding to make these young people employable at the end of the period. That is in the MOU, but we would also like to see retention.
We understand the problem Cosatu has with the youth wage subsidy. It cannot be seen as a displacement mechanism. I absolutely agree with that. However, what we have proven in the process of this pilot project with the 2 000-odd young people is that in excess of 70% are retained within the companies that offered them those skills benefits. We see the numbers advertised by the national project, where we are talking about a possible 423 000 jobs at a cost of R28 000 a job. However, our youth wage skills project has managed to come in at R15 000 a job.