South Africa has an important opportunity to unlock the potential of its young people by widening pathways into work, making access to opportunities more affordable and equitable, and helping young people build the experience they need to contribute to the country’s future growth. Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator plays a key role in this effort: it connects young people to opportunities, supporting employers to see potential differently, and strengthening the systems that enable youth economic inclusion at scale.
South Africa’s youth unemployment crisis is often described in numbers: millions of young people remain outside employment, education or training, too few jobs being created and too many young people locked out before they have even had a fair chance to prove themselves. But for Mosuoe Sekonyela, Chief Government Relations Officer at Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator (Harambee), the challenge is not only that South Africa does not have enough jobs…it is also that the pathways into work remain too narrow, too expensive and too uneven.
“The first key thing to acknowledge is that there are just not enough jobs. Some have called it the jobs crisis in the country, but that is clearly not the only barrier, even though it is a critical issue,” says Sekonyela.
Without a growing economy, the country will struggle to create the volume of opportunities required, but focusing only on growth risks missing the everyday structural barriers that prevent young people from accessing current opportunities. The first obstacle is the way employers read signals of employability. Many young people are judged on school marks, work experience or polished CVs, even though these indicators often reflect privilege rather than potential.
“A matric certificate does not mean much to an employer, so what are the signals that you can help young people with?” asks Sekonyela.
This is where the SA Youth platform (sayouth.mobi), which is managed by Harambee, plays an important role. By creating a free digital pathway to opportunities, it reduces the need for young people to print multiple CVs or spend money moving from place to place in search of work. With over 1.6 million earning opportunities enabled from over 3000 employers, it also helps employers see talent that may otherwise remain hidden.
The second barrier is cost, as looking for work can be expensive, especially in a country still shaped by Apartheid geography. Young people often live far from areas of economic activity and may need to travel repeatedly for applications, interviews and follow-ups. Harambee’s research has shown that it can cost around R1 500 to look for work and, for someone without a current income, that is a major exclusionary factor.
“It costs money to look for a job and, even once you have found the job, it costs money to stay in the job. There are a lot of invisible costs related to young people looking for work that have to be removed,” says Sekonyela.
The third barrier is that the labour market no longer offers the linear career paths of the past. Young people increasingly move in and out of short-term work, learning opportunities, public employment programmes and informal income-generating activity. Sekonyela argues that South Africa must stop treating work as if every young person will enter one job and remain there for decades.
“The pathway is not a straight line–it is fragmented. Young people often zigzag in and out of employment,” adds Sekonyela.
That reality is particularly clear in public employment programmes. Sekonyela cites the teacher assistant programme which employed around 200 000 young people through the Department of Basic Education. The programme reached young people across the country, including rural and peri-urban areas and its impact extended beyond the individuals employed.
“When a young person earns a stipend for six months, at a minimum wage, that often supports the economy of that community,” he says, adding that public employment also gives young people valuable work experience by building transferable skills.
For Harambee, this links directly to the idea of demand-led solutions, which relies on understanding where the real jobs are and where more can be unlocked.
“You have to understand what the labour market, employers and customers need and then work backwards in terms of skilling young people towards that demand,” says Sekonyela, who believes South Africa’s skilling system is not yet responsive enough to market needs. One example is the digital sector. Through working with partners such as Collective X Harambee identified around 66 000 entry-level digital opportunities in areas such as coding, testing, cybersecurity and cloud-based platforms. In many cases, the issue is not that young people lack ability. It is that the training system does not move quickly enough to close specific skills gaps.
“You do not need to complete a four-year computer science degree if the employer just needs Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform or Python skills,” he adds.
This also makes public-private partnerships essential. Government, business and civil society each hold the key to different parts of the solution. Government has scale and reach, business understands demand and creates opportunities, while civil society often has deep community trust and insight. Through work linked to the Presidential Youth Employment Intervention, Harambee and its partners have identified core levers that, if pulled together while the economy grows, could help bring an additional 1.8 million young people into work by 2030.
Sekonyela compares the youth unemployment challenge to other moments when South Africa has had to mobilise across sectors. During Covid-19, for example, the Solidarity Fund showed what is possible when government, business, and civil society aligned around a national crisis. Business has a particularly important role to play, and Sekonyela’s first request is simple: open up opportunities for young people and hire more inclusively. Employers must look beyond narrow filters such as marks, prior experience or traditional CVs.
“You have to hire for potential and not just privilege. You are missing a significant percentage of the talent pool if you are not trying to look outside of your general hiring practices,” he says, highlighting how a young person who volunteers at church, sells products in their community or helps organise local activities may believe they have no work experience, yet they would have developed communication skills, reliability, problem-solving and customer-facing skills through their community activities and tools such as the SA Youth CV, to help translate those experiences into signals employers can understand.
“Technology enables young people to articulate their own competence. It also enables employers to see talent that would otherwise be hidden from them,” says Sekonyela.
Business can also support work-integrated learning where young people gain experience while solving real business problems. Sekonyela cites a young woman from Khayelitsha who entered a work-integrated learning pathway in the digital sector. She worked on active client projects in a supported environment for over 12 months and later secured a job earning R14 000 a month, and her experience demonstrates what is possible when demand, training and workplace exposure align. It is a model that meets real business needs while opening doors for excluded talent. Businesses can further support youth employment by opening their supply chains to young entrepreneurs and self-employed people.
Policy reform also matters, and Sekonyela points to instruments such as the Employment Tax Incentive, the Skills Development Levy and B-BBEE as areas that could be sharpened to better incentivise youth hiring.
“Young people want to work. The question is whether our systems make it possible for them to access, navigate and stay in work,” cautions Sekonyela.
The task ahead is to widen the gates to employment: grow the economy, reduce the cost of job search, reform public employment, support self-employment, align training with demand, and help employers hire differently.
“At Harambee, we often talk about being in love with the problem and not the solution,” laughs Sekonyela. “The world is volatile and uncertain. What will insulate us is being responsive, going back to the problem we are trying to solve and asking whether that problem has shifted.”
For South Africa, the problem is urgent, but the opportunity is equally clear. If government, business and civil society can act together, then the country can build an employment ecosystem that sees young people not as a risk but, rather as the talent, energy and future of the economy. 