By Tshego Walker and Mosuoe Sekonyela
As South Africa's Grade 12 exam season is underway, we cannot help but be reminded of the steep and uncertain path facing youth after completing formal schooling.
The reality is clear: statistics show that of the approximately one million young people who enter the labour market annually, 60% of them will find themselves not in employment, education, or training (NEET), within the next year.
Only 30% of these youths will find employment in the formal economy, with the remaining 30% venturing into small-scale entrepreneurship.
In short, our country is grappling with a crisis that prevents young South Africans from accessing sustainable livelihoods and threatens our nation's progress.
We must all be acutely aware that these young people are the future policymakers, teachers, entrepreneurs, artisans and more, forming the bedrock of South Africa’s socio-economic stability and economic prosperity.
With a 45.5% youth unemployment rate, the depth and breadth of the crisis is not in question. So, the real question becomes, what will it actually take to absorb SA’s youth into the labour market, earning incomes, at scale? Much like the challenge, the answer is complex, but what is apparent is that it is far too large to be solved by a single actor. What is of utmost importance is strategically coordinated collaboration between businesses, government, civil society, and the youth. This collaboration should be supported by a detailed roadmap and a shared performance dashboard to ensure collective accountability. By doing so, we will be breaking down silos and leveraging the strengths of all sectors to overcome the challenges of youth economic inclusion.
We know that a young person’s chances of landing and keeping a job is greatly influenced by their level of education. Compared to those without matric, youth with tertiary education have a greater chance of transitioning from unemployment into formal employment. To this end, government has stepped up its public employment opportunities over the past decade to ensure that they provide much-needed transferrable skills training to enable youth to learn on the job and move on to jobs in other sectors of the economy.
Gaps that need to be plugged include a critical review of how young people are equipped for the job market in the first place. The full journey from education, training and placement needs to be analysed, to ensure that youth leaving the school system have the basic attributes that would attract employers to support their transition into the workplace. As such, we must place strong emphasis on pathwaying young people from one opportunity into the next, keeping them engaged, learning and earning whilst we build the economy South African youth can actively participate in. As a country, we need to ramp up demand-led skilling programmes to ensure that young people are equipped for the work that exists now, as well as jobs of the future.
Understanding the power of technology to transform society, the SA Youth Platform was launched in 2021 and is a core tenet of the Presidential Youth Employment Intervention (PYEI). SA Youth is an easy-to-use, online hiring platform through which over 1,100,000 unique opportunities have been created, but given the fact that over half of South Africa’s youth are NEET, we must do more, faster, together.
After graduating in 2020 Thabiso, unable to find employment opportunities, signed up on the SAYouth.mobi platform, where he came across and subsequently applied for a Teacher Assistant position.
A product of a partnership between the Department of Basic Education and the Presidential Employment Stimulus (PES), the programme successfully recruited 319 000 Teacher Assistants through the SA Youth Platform that year. Thabiso was successfully matched with a school in his neighbourhood, enabling him to get practical work experience along with an earning opportunity.
When the programme ended, Thabiso got back onto SAYouth.mobi to search for more opportunities.
He came across the Youth Employment Services (YES) 12-month internship at a large corporate, where he was later absorbed as a Client Service Specialist.
“After spending some time unemployed, I had all but given up hope. I am now able to provide for myself and my family.”
Public Employment Programmes (PEPs) have the ability to assist millions of young people in a predicament similar to Thabiso’s to gain the work experience that they need to get absorbed into the labour market. Since the advent of COVID-19, approximately 2 million young people were able to earn some income, stay active, engaged and contributing meaningfully to their communities whilst gaining the skills required to enter the labour market.
Criticism of PEPs tends to centre on the fact that they are often short-term. However, the numbers tell a revealing story: young people with work experience are four times more likely to find employment than those without it.
This "experience dividend" underscores the critical role that internships, apprenticeships, and workplace exposure play in bridging the gap between education and employment. Furthermore, because PEPs are enabling service delivery in all parts of the country, they create earning opportunities for youth who live in job deserts which provides some stability to a fragile labour market, mitigating the risks of social unrest that we saw in July of 2021.
As we confront the challenge of youth unemployment, the question is not just how we create jobs, but how we equip our youth with the skills and experiences that make them truly employable.
The PYEI was launched to do exactly this, through providing the country with a national coordinated strategy that reduces the structural barriers that young people face to entering the economy.
From giving young people access to quality work experience programmes, to ensuring that they are skilled for jobs that are in demand in today’s economy to giving young entrepreneurs the tools to succeed.
At its core, this initiative aims to pathway young people successfully from learning to earning.
It focuses on linking young people to existing opportunities, addressing the systemic barriers to youth unemployment and creating new jobs for youth. Partnership is core to the PYEI and key partners include, the Department of Employment and Labour, the Department of Higher Education and Training, the National Youth Development Agency, the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition and Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator.
The intervention brings together government, civil society, development partners, academia and the private sector.
The truth is, tackling youth economic participation isn’t just about ticking boxes on policy reforms or launching well-intentioned programmes.
The elephant in the room is that we have been well-intentioned yet slow to move beyond talk to sustainable action—and that is on all of us: government, private sector, and civil society. Without multisectoral collaboration, there will be no meaningful change.
If we continue to treat youth unemployment as a problem for tomorrow, we risk losing the very generation that holds the key to our country's future, today. Our young people are more than capable of rising to the occasion, but we need to meet them halfway by creating the conditions for them to succeed.
Tshego Walker is the director, presidential youth employment intervention and Mosuoe Sekonyela is the chief government relations officer at Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator.
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