South Africa doesn’t have a job creation problem. It has an alignment problem.
We know where the jobs are, and we know our young people are eager to work. So why aren’t we connecting the dots?
By Tshego Bokaba, CSI Manager at Momentum Group Foundation
SOUTH Africa has 200,000 agricultural jobs waiting to be filled. We have a thriving business process outsourcing (BPO) sector, including call centres, customer service, data processing and back-office administration, that can absorb entry-level workers at scale. Our technology sector is hungry for digitally literate young people. Yet 60% of our youth are unemployed. This is unacceptable.
The glaring gap between available employment and eager young people seems to be a donga the breadth of the Orange River. We know where the jobs are, and we know where the youth are. Our youngsters are ready to work, yet the system is failing them desperately.
Why is that? It’s a question that keeps us up at night at Momentum Group Foundation. It was also the hot topic of conversation at the recent On the Record conference, which brought together international economists, policymakers and business leaders to ask how South Africa can create five million formal jobs in the next decade. The answer that kept coming back was that we don’t lack insight; we lack alignment.
South Africa is not short of good ideas or well-intentioned programmes. We’re also not short of opportunity. Growth sectors like BPO, technology and agriculture demand people with a combination of technical skills, digital literacy and work readiness. Yet the education system is struggling to deliver that combination, and too many young people knock on the door only partially prepared. The Sector Education and Training Authority (SETA) model illustrates this clearly. These government bodies, which are funded through a levy paid by employers, are meant to ensure training in each sector is aligned to what the industry actually needs. But what we’re seeing in the real world is that government programmes, private sector initiatives and NGOs often pass each other like ships in the night instead of working together in a coordinated system. The result is duplication in some areas, serious gaps in others, and no central mechanism to match trained young people with the employers that need them.
At the Momentum Group Foundation, we have made a deliberate choice to invest where the evidence points to real employment outcomes. We fund agriculture through our Women in Farming initiative and BPO and tech skills through partners like Harambee, ALX and WeThinkCode, and we require every partner to show us where the young people who complete it will actually be placed. Curricula must be aligned to what employers are hiring for today, and wherever possible employers must have a hand in designing it. A certificate that does not lead to a job is not a result.
What South Africa needs is for every institution in this ecosystem – government, tertiary education institutes, corporates and NGOs – to apply that same discipline. Our youth are ready and willing. The industry is crying out for a skilled labour force. Let’s stop working in silos and building the bridge our young people deserve.
Caption to photograph: Tshego Bokaba, CSI Manager at Momentum Group Foundation
