In his 2026 State of the Nation address, President Cyril Ramaphosa highlighted South Africa’s ongoing unemployment crisis and particularly its effects on young people. The concern for and commitment to improving the lives of South African youth is welcome and needed. What is missed, however, when youth are viewed solely through the lens of their economic (in)activities, or a problem to be solved through a pipeline from training, to skills acquisition, to employability, fuelled by a tech-enabled and digital “revolution”? And, what creative opportunities for more holistic social, cultural, and economic wellbeing are not yet being leveraged?
In Q1 2025, StatsSA reported a youth unemployment rate (for ages 15-34) of 46.1%, or 4.8 million young people. If the focus is narrowed to young people under 24, many of whom are looking for first jobs, this rate rises to a worrying 58%. Young people who are “NEET” (not in employment, education and training) and not actively seeking to change this, are often called “inactive”. Definitions of economic “inactivity” are shifting in response to growing recognition of informal economies, but this framework still has some glaring blind spots.
While decent work and financial security are crucial, we caution against only articulating the value of young people through their economic action, contribution, or as the backbone of future economies. The ‘NOT’ in NEET is very loud and risks us perceiving young people solely as what they “lack”, without regard for their agency, creativity, cultural presence or an acknowledgement of the activities they already pursue independently. “Inactivity” obscures that young people take on caregiving responsibilities at home and in the community; create art and music; engage in political organising, protest and mobilisation; or a myriad other activities linked to creativity, community, wellbeing and agency that cannot be understood exclusively in economic terms. In South Africa’s youth policy, even mental health is framed primarily in terms of its risks and benefits to young people’s ability to contribute to the economy.
This language of deficiency and inactivity is not unique to South Africa. It comes directly from policies and high-level reports from international agencies such as the UN, World Bank, IMF, the AU and national youth policies and frameworks. The Africa Youth Unemployment Clock estimates relatively low numbers of “unemployed” youth using a narrow definition (23 million or just over 4% of young people on the continent) compared to the figures for “inactive” youth, estimated to comprise 15%, or almost 82 million people. This gap is striking: can it really be the case that 82 million young people on the continent are doing nothing?
Tracing the data underpinning these reports reveals that youth priorities are predominantly shaped by economists, whose analysis omits that decent lives are more expansive than a person’s employment status. Even the IMF admits that the paucity of consistent and credible data in Africa necessitates reliance on predictive forecasting models and algorithms for this region, raising the possibility of a significant divergence between conjecture and lived reality.
While it is true that “too many young people struggle to find their first job” (SONA), imposing the primary responsibility on young people to ‘do better’, by completing well-meaning programmes designed by adults who know what is best, absolves institutions of the responsibility to re-think their assumptions, approaches, and programming to more effectively address structural challenges. We are convinced that institutions committed to investing in youth development stand to benefit from deeper insight into what young people are already doing, beyond the narrow economic lens of job-full-ness.
The president confidently asserted that “[t]o enable the youth of today to transform our society and secure their future, we are preparing the ground for a skills revolution”. The skills pathway that currently predominates is predicated on the assumption that niche skills, with a heavy emphasis on a “digital revolution”, will naturally lead to job placements. However, current labour market trends do not back this up. There are simply not 16,8 million jobs in Africa.
Technology shapeshifts faster than most public officials and policies can keep pace with, undermining their ability to provide effective policy and regulatory guidance. Emphasising skills development as the foremost way in which to ‘harness’ digital opportunities is a risky proposition, as training programmes typically lag behind technological innovation, becoming outdated even as they are being implemented. AI has exacerbated this challenge, rendering many of the jobs young people are up-skilled to perform obsolete in record time.
Nevertheless, huge investments continue to be expended on skills training programmes and facilities without a commensurate investment to understand what skills and knowledge young people desire, the resources they already possess, and their current and future social, political, cultural and economic interests and ambitions.
Young people remain at the forefront of using, adapting and creating technologies in surprising and often unacknowledged ways: from organising social, cultural and political lives through social media platforms, to creating new learning opportunities and sharing skills and resources through community servers, to hustling livelihoods from eWaste, which they also use to create artistic installations.
The cultural and creative sector is a sphere dominated by young people, which is often under-appreciated by labour analysts. The music industry is not only shaped by record labels and streaming royalties. Take Gqom, for example, which emerged in the informal sound set-ups of Durban townships and was brought to popular attention by inventive youth-led hustles and taxi sound-system collaborations and mediated by innovative digital skills.
A significant number of young people are sustained by arts, culture and creative industries, yet state funding and resource priorities can be skewed towards formal art markets, economies and institutions. South Africa has experienced a string of problematic Sports, Arts and Culture Ministers who at best were ineffective and, at worst, actively oppositional. Many policy and implementation decisions about what is ‘desirable’ and ‘respectable’ culture are made on narrow notions of heritage, which have been repeatedly critiqued as limiting the scope and support of cultural life.
To “appreciate how sport and cultural activities build a cohesive society” requires appointing more appropriately aligned and imaginative people to authorising spaces and engaging those most active in the sector, who are young, dynamic, digitally adept, and often working in informal and less visible cultural spaces.
To invest and create enabling environments for culture requires knowing what is important to people, including recognising what young people see as cultural priorities for social and economic life. Cultural mapping that involves deeper knowledge at local scale has proven successful to appropriately allocate resources and connect across local and national scales, making visible existing underground creative economies alongside more established industries. An appreciation for the socio-economic benefits of the creative industries can also contribute to more targeted and responsive cultural planning, enriching heritage overlay zones, and culture-led decision making for urban planning, which intentionally draws on inter-generational knowledge and experience, and creates an enabling environment for young people to thrive.
Effective cultural mapping and planning requires drawing out and enhancing confidence in youth as researchers, facilitators and knowledge makers; tapping into social networks and social media: a digital skill many young people possess without formal education and training; remunerating young people for work they are already undertaking and strengthening civic practice to fundamentally re-shape the ways in which young people are engaged in local governance and public decision-making.
Public officials can provide policy and investment direction to the public and private sector that opens up a multiplicity of livelihood opportunities, digitally enabled and otherwise, for young people. If a commitment to youth-led initiative is to be taken seriously, it is imperative to include youth in decision making on where to direct investment, how to design curricula for skills training, which job markets to prioritise, including those that may not yet exist.
Nokukhanya Mncwabe, Rike Sitas, and Naomi Roux and are based at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town. This article draws on a research project called afrotecha.urban and over ten years of research into urban culture as part of the Culture, Technology, and Society research cluster.
If a commitment to youth-led initiative is to be taken seriously, it is imperative to include youth in decision making on where to direct investment, how to design curricula for skills training, which job markets to prioritise, including those that may not yet exist.
