Digital jobs are a national priority, says Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies, Solly Malatsi, and delivering them will take government, business, funders, and education providers acting together.
The minister was addressing delegates at the CollectiveXChange 2026 conference where the CollectiveXChange Manifesto was adopted, committing every part of the ecosystem to the National Digital Skills Plan’s objective: 500 000 young South Africans in in-demand digital jobs by 2034.
“The harder problem is people,” Malatsi says. “A masterplan without a workforce is a well-designed plan with nobody to execute it.”
The department’s revised Digital Economy Masterplan, released in July, estimates that the digital economy can create at least 1-million new jobs over the next decade.
The minister described a paradox standing in the way.
According to Collective X’s 2025 research, nearly 90 000 of the country’s more than 300 000 ICT jobs remain unfilled, while Statistics South Africa reports that 47,4% of young people in the labour force are unemployed.
Malatsi was clear that government cannot close that gap on its own. “Government can’t and shouldn’t create all the solutions,” he says. “We must be an enabling state, not a controlling one.”
That call for shared responsibility ran through the conference.
“Nobody can do this alone,” says Ziaad Suleman, CEO of Cassava Technologies and chair of the Collective X board. “We all have a responsibility – whether you’re an employer, a trainer, a funder or anybody else. Nobody’s coming to solve this for us, we have to do it together.”
Collective X, the not-for-profit organisation coordinating the National Digital Skills Plan, convened the conference to move the sector from fragmented, short-term training and employment projects to coordinated delivery at scale.
The size of the task is stark. South Africa currently produces around 20 000 digitally skilled workers, and even doubling that to more than 40 000 by 2030 is only a step toward 500 000 young people in digital work by 2034.
The CollectiveXChange Manifesto sets out what the ecosystem has committed to do next across three areas. Collective X will track and measure progress against every commitment.
Policy alignment. Partners committed to building multi-year certainty for outcomes-based skilling, stronger demand signals so that training keeps pace with employers, more agile recognition of skills and curricula, and trust built on verified placement and employment outcomes.
Multi-year financing. The Manifesto calls for skills funding to pay for verified employment rather than simply training activity, to finance the delivery capacity that providers need, and to back models that can be replicated nationally. It commits to pooling government, business and philanthropic capital around shared outcomes – with measurement that stays rigorous, but simple enough to scale.
Skills for the AI era. Based on the recommendations from new research commissioned by Collective X on South Africa’s AI future, conference participants agreed to build educator and trainer capability first, reuse national delivery systems that already work, and treat AI as a whole-of-government agenda. The aim is to prepare South Africans for more than existing jobs: to use AI to raise productivity, earn an income and build businesses – in a transition that keeps people at its centre.
The minister set the standard that progress will be judged against.
“We have to focus on measuring impact and the number of lives meaningfully changed,” he says, challenging every skills programme to answer one question: “Six months to a year after the course ended, how many of these young people are working in a digital role or have started a business?”
That outcomes test is already being applied through the R700-million Digital Skills Impact Fund, Collective X’s outcomes-based funding instrument, launched in 2024.
To date, the fund has supported more than 4 000 young people through training-to-employment pathways – 70% of them women. Young people on fund-supported programmes have achieved an employment absorption rate of 98%.
Young people were central to the conversation.
In youth-led sessions, participants challenged senior leaders to remove the barriers between training and meaningful work. They also called for support beyond training itself, to help them turn new skills into careers, businesses, and opportunities for others.
“I’m originally from Soshanguve where there is a lot of poverty,” says Given Manyike who recently completed a data consultant programme at Calybre, supported by the Digital Skills Impact Fund. “I want to go back and improve where I come from, but more importantly, I want to pass on the tech skills I’ve learned to young people there.”
Malatsi’s closing challenge was aimed squarely at employers.
“Every executive here was once somebody’s risk. Our young people deserve the same chance,” he says. “South Africa does not lack young people with ability. It lacks enough people prepared to give them a start.”