This Youth Day (tomorrow, 16 June) marks 50 years since the school children of Soweto were met with deadly police force for marching against Bantu Education.
They were demanding a different future, and the promise made back to them, renewed at democracy, was that young people are this country’s future and would be invested in as such. Half a century later, that promise is only half-kept: young people are qualifying in record numbers and already head nearly a quarter of South Africa’s households, but close to 10-million 15-to-34-year-olds are shut out of work, education, and training, and the government is cutting down the very programmes proven to get them in.
The latest General Household Survey (GHS) points to important gains in educational attainment, but the labour market tells a devastating story.
On access, there has been real movement; the share of adults with at least a matric has climbed from 30.5% in 2002 to 52.9% in 2025. More young people are qualifying than in any generation before them. But access has widened without being secured.
The second promise remains unfulfilled. Almost six in 10 young people (58.1%) aged 24 are not in employment, education or training. For the age group 15 to 24, nearly four million young people are NEET. Moreover, when you include those between the ages of 25 and 34, the number jumps close to 10-million.
Despite these challenges, young people have held up their end, according to Buhlebethu Magwaza, Youth Capital project lead.
Young people are carrying significant responsibilities, facing economic hardship, and struggling to access opportunities. The policy challenge, then, is how to create pathways through those barriers. Public Employment Programmes (PEPs) remain among the few interventions capable of meeting young people where they are and at the scale the crisis requires. They do far more than create temporary work opportunities: they provide young people with work experience, a source of income, and access to an ecosystem of support, relationships, and opportunities that can propel them towards longer-term livelihoods and economic participation.
Over and above that, these programmes help close critical gaps in the social fabric by responding to needs that would otherwise go unmet in our communities.
The Basic Education Employment Initiative (BEEI) is the clearest case. In 2025, it placed almost 200 000 young people with valuable work experience while strengthening schools, supporting teachers and learners, improving literacy and learning outcomes. In this way, every rand invested delivered benefits not only for participants, but for communities and public services as well. Yet precisely at the moment that evidence points towards a need for expansion, the programme has since been wound down.
In a labour market moving in the wrong direction, the decision to retreat from one of the country’s largest youth employment interventions is difficult to reconcile with the government’s stated commitment to employment creation, says Magwaza.
South Africa shed 345 000 jobs in the first quarter of 2026 alone, with more than half of those losses occurring in community and social services, the very sector where many public employment opportunities are concentrated.
In the recently tabled 2026 Budget Votes, there was remarkable agreement about the scale of youth unemployment, there usually is. South Africa has spent years diagnosing the crisis. When presenting the votes for their different departments, for the Presidency, the President described job creation as one of the government’s foremost priorities. The Minister of Employment and Labour characterised South Africa’s unemployment challenge as a “missing jobs crisis”. The Minister of Small Business Development argued that political freedom must increasingly translate into economic freedom, particularly for young people and women. The Department of Women, Youth, and Persons with Disabilities continues to position youth economic participation as central to its mandate.
Youth Capital agrees. But young people cannot build futures out of speeches.
The South African government has framed this fiftieth anniversary as a year of action focused on accelerating investment in youth development.
Fifty years ago, young people put their lives on the line for the promise of a real education and a real future. This Youth Day, the most honest thing we can say is that the promise is only half-kept. Young people are qualifying in record numbers, they are running households, and they are ready. Yet the pathways into work, livelihoods, and economic participation remain far too narrow for the scale of the need. You cannot keep telling a generation that they are the future and then refuse to invest in them. Honouring 1976 means backing that promise with a budget, this year of all years, says Magwaza.
Ahead of the Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement, Youth Capital is calling on the government to match the language of a “year of action” rhetoric with at least a single commitment that would prove it: a ring-fenced, multi-year public employment budget that guarantees at least one million funded opportunities for young people every year. Today, action has to mean more than commemoration, Magwaza says.
If youth unemployment is the defining challenge of our generation, then it must become one of the defining priorities of our country’s budget. It must shape spending decisions. It must influence what gets protected when resources are scarce. And it must be reflected in the scale of investment directed towards livelihoods and employment opportunities for young people, adds Magwaza.
This Youth Day, commemoration is not the test; investment is. Young people do not need another promise; they need to see that the country’s budgets, policies, and priorities reflect the future they have repeatedly been told belongs to them. The national budget is where the country keeps its word.