opportunities for unskilled and particularly young people.
The state of Penang in Malaysia is one of the regions that has seen substantial employment benefit through SEZs, attracting large investments into the high-tech manufacturing industry. The number of manufacturing plants in Penang has increase from 31 in 1970 to 743 by 1997. In that period, the number of people employed has also grown from approximately 3000 to nearly 200 000 (ILO, 2006).

9. CONCLUSION
This paper has identified South Africa’s biggest development challenge as its ‘triple challenge’ of poverty, inequality and unemployment. Further to this the unemployment crisis has been singled out the toughest test to date over the past 20years for the democratic government. Although the notion of ‘jobless growth’ has been dismissed, the inability of the labour market to absorb new entrants has been the starting point for the discussion on youth unemployment that was pursed.
The youth unemployment crisis in South Africa is the country’s tipping point ‘ solving this crisis could catapult the country economically and enhance global competitiveness. In the same vein, if left unabated, the swelling population of unemployed youth can erode most, if not all, of the gains of the past 20years.
It has been argued that South Africa’s post-Apartheid labour market perpetuates and reinforce youth unemployment leading to a range of risk patterns that litter the economic and labour landscape of the country. Much attention was given to these risk patterns including labour market failure, credit market failure, location-related failures, training systems failure, labour regulation failure, and the psyche and behavioral vulnerabilities that are likely to be exhibited by young people that are locked out of the labour force.
Borrowing from Development Finance, a pragmatic approach was adopted in the solutions proposed. The challenge of youth unemployment is not new and this therefore allowed for some of the notable interventions to be interrogated, albeit superficially. The end goal of the exercise of reviewing existing interventions was to propose alternatives or means of strengthening and bolstering the work that is already underway.

Continental and global examples were drawn to support proposals that