The South African economy has grown by an average of 3.2% a year from 1994 to 2012, while the number of people employed increased by about 5.6-million, or 60%, between 1994 and 2013, President Jacob Zuma said on Tuesday at the release of the Presidency’s 20-year review.

While this growth was “most welcome”, it was modest when compared with that of other emerging economies, he said.

“It has also been [in]adequate [in] reducing unemployment substantially,” Zuma said, adding that the review indicated that the increase in the number of those employed had been offset by a larger increase in the number of people looking for work.

“The reasons for this include population growth. Another factor is increasing urbanisation, which, in turn, was partly a result of the dismantling of the homeland system and the removal of the pass laws. There are also increasing numbers of women looking for work, [owing] to advances in gender equality, which is another achievement of democracy and freedom,” he added.

Further, the President said to move the country forward, government, business and labour had to work together towards sustaining higher economic growth rates, in future, to substantially reduce unemployment, as was emphasised in the National Development Plan.

Meanwhile, since the mid-2000s government had placed increasing emphasis on the establishment of economic infrastructure such as ports, rail, dams and power stations, with investment having increased dramatically over the past five years.

“Central coordination of infrastructure delivery, through the Presidential Infrastructure Coordinating Commission, has improved delivery and assists to remove bottlenecks faster,” Zuma said.

He added that investments, including those in much needed social infrastructure, such as water,s anitation, electricity, schools, colleges and housing, would increase further in future.

Further, with regard to basic services, a number of municipalities, which had little or no pre-existing institutional foundations, were now able to deliver basic services to thousands of people who did not have these services 20 years ago, Zuma said.

The focus was now on reaching communities that were still "waiting", particularly in informal settlements in urban areas and in remote rural areas.

More importantly, the focus would be on improving the technical and management expertise of municipalities so that they could function better and also be able to maintain key infrastructure that supplied water and electricity to communities, among other services, Zuma stated.

“To fight poverty and inequality, as illustrated in detail in the review, a range of pro-poor government policies have been implemented since 1994, which [are] among South Africa’s key achievements. The result is that our country has achieved, or is on track to achieve, most of the UN Millennium Development Goals by 2015,” the President said.

South Africa had also, over the past 20 years, made progress with regard to education.

While backlogs in school infrastructure remained, thousands of schools had been built and connected to water and electricity supply since 1994, with about 370 modern schools having been built over the past five years alone.

“In 2009, we split the education departments in two, focusing on basic and higher education and training respectively, to ensure an intensive corrective focus in each sector, [while] in the last five years, the Annual National Assessments system was introduced to enable an objective assessment of the education system below Grade 12 for the first time,” Zuma said.

He added that university enrolment had almost doubled since 1994, and there had also been huge increases in enrolments at further education and training colleges, following an intensive focus on these colleges in the past five years.