Entrepreneur Of The Year Awards reopen as South Africa looks to founders for job creation
South Africa’s small business sector is being asked to do the heavy lifting on jobs, and the latest labour figures show just how steep the climb has become.
Statistics South Africa’s Quarterly Labour Force Survey for the first quarter of 2026 put the official unemployment rate at 32.7%, up 1.3 percentage points from the previous quarter, with 8.1 million people out of work. For young people aged 15 to 34 the rate climbed by 2 percentage points to 45.8%. Among the youngest workers, those aged 15 to 24, joblessness now sits above 60%. Of the roughly 10.3 million people in that younger band, 37.6% are not in employment, education or training.
That backdrop is doing a lot of work in the way entrepreneurship is being framed this year. As the country marks 50 years since the 1976 Soweto Uprising under the national theme RESET@50: The Future Calls, the message coming from policymakers is moving away from treating young people as a line in the unemployment numbers and towards positioning them as the people who can build a way out of it.
The economic logic is hard to argue with. The National Development Plan expects small and medium enterprises to generate 90% of all new jobs in South Africa by 2030. In practice that means the businesses being started in townships, garages and spare rooms right now are the ones expected to absorb the young people the formal sector keeps shedding. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, the formal sector lost roughly 189,000 jobs.
There is a local angle worth holding onto. While most provinces shed workers over the quarter, the Western Cape led the country with 70,000 additional jobs, a reminder that regional conditions can run against the national grain.
It is against this picture that the Business Partners Limited Entrepreneur of the Year awards have opened for entries for 2026, now in their 38th year. The programme, one of the longest running recognition platforms of its kind in the country, is running under the theme Generation Build and is openly tying itself to the national conversation about who gets to shape the next 50 years.
“Entrepreneurship is where government’s call meets practical action,” says Gugu Mjadu of Business Partners Limited. “A single viable business creates household income, keeps suppliers going, and supports the local economy. Multiplied across thousands of founders, that is what turns RESET@50 from a national theme into lived reality.”
The 2025 winners give a sense of who the awards are looking for. Overall winner Aphiwe Khambule is chief operating officer of 21st Century Funeral Services, leading the second generation of a family business in an industry the organisers put at around R10 billion. The medium business title, along with the job creator award, went to Thatiso Dube of clothing brand GALXBOY, who has grown from selling T shirts out of his car in 2008 to running 15 stores and employing more than 200 people. Other category winners included Professor Monique Zaahl of genetic testing firm GENEdiagnostics, Hamilton Stephenson of industrial safety manufacturer Technogrid, and Tebogo Kale of Gravitas Minerals, recognised for mineral processing technology.
As with any industry award, those milestones are presented by the organisers and the entrants themselves, so the growth figures attached to individual winners are best read as claims rather than audited results. What is not in dispute is the gap the awards are pointing at.
Winners for 2026 will be announced at a ceremony in October, with prizes that include cash, mentorship, technical assistance and business exposure. Entries close on 2 August 2026 and can be submitted at www.eoy.co.za.
