A Geographically Weighted Regression Analysis of Barriers to Youth’s Participation in Local Development Planning in Gauteng Province, South Africa

With South Africa having a history of youth activism and a predominantly youthful population, this paper investigates why the youth (18-34 years) do not participate in local development planning in Gauteng Province. The main source of data used in this study was the 2015/2016 QoL data of the Gauteng City-Region Observatory (GCRO). Results across Gauteng show that the majority of the youth do not participate in ward committee (WC), community development forum (CDF), and integrated development planning (IDP) meetings. The geographically weighted regression (GWR) approach proved important in allowing us to investigate the spatial variation in non-attendance at WC meetings and the heterogeneity role of the predictor variables over the study area. The GWR results show that the percentage of employed youth, average household income, the percentage of youth who have never interacted with government, the percentage of youth dissatisfied with the local councillor, and the average educational level of the youth emerged as barriers to participation in WC meetings. While results for non-participation in CDF meetings had no significant localised GWR results, compared to those for WC meetings, common barriers (as in the ordinary least squares (OLS) model) to participation in CDF meetings were, for instance, the youth’s educational level and the lack of interaction with local government. Even according to the OLS model, the results of IDP meetings were not robust, and could not therefore be interpreted. Overall, however, these results are useful in spurring spatially-targeted – either region-wide or localised – policies.