President Cyril Ramaphosa. (GCIS)
President Cyril Ramaphosa has defended his administration’s efforts to address the country’s deepening youth unemployment crisis, saying it requires a broad approach, including investing in education and skills development and encouraging entrepreneurship among young people.
In his weekly newsletter, which coincided with South Africa observing Youth Day, Ramaphosa singled out the Presidential Employment Stimulus and the Presidential Youth Employment Intervention as two flagship programmes that have helped to cushion the blow of a stagnant labour market.
The country’s youth unemployment rate remains among the highest in the world, with more than 60% of people aged 15 to 24 unable to find work, according to Statistics South Africa. Official youth unemployment, for those aged between 15 and 34, increased by 9.2% from the last quarter of 2024 to 46.1% in the first quarter of 2025.
“To overcome this challenge we need an approach that includes investing in education and skills development, fostering youth entrepreneurship and implementing targeted employment programmes focusing on young people,” the president wrote.
He said the Presidential Employment Stimulus and Presidential Youth Employment Intervention were “providing opportunities to hundreds of thousands of young people at a time when not enough jobs are being created to absorb new entrants into the labour market”.
Launched in 2020, the Presidential Employment Stimulus has supported more than two million work and livelihood opportunities. According to the presidency, 72% of the participants were young people and 66% were women.
The president also praised the SAYouth.mobi platform, a zero-rated data-free site that connects unemployed young people to training and job opportunities. Ramaphosa said 4.7 million young people have registered on SAYouth.mobi and on the department of employment and labour’s employment services database, collectively accessing more than 1.6 million earning opportunities.
Beyond simply creating jobs, Ramaphosa said his government is working to remove systemic barriers that prevent young people from reaching the labour market. In 2019, the requirement for work experience in entry-level public service jobs was abolished, a move he said has opened the door for first-time jobseekers.
“Young people have often expressed frustration around the onerous experience requirements from employers that effectively serve as a barrier to entry for them,” Ramaphosa said.
Public-private partnerships, such as the Youth Employment Service, have placed thousands of young people in workplaces across a range of economic sectors, offering much-needed experience, said Ramaphosa.
But he conceded that formal employment opportunities alone were not enough, stressing the need to bolster skills development and nurture entrepreneurship among the youth.
“The extent and scale of the youth unemployment crisis means that we should not focus solely on placing more young people in formal, existing jobs,” he wrote.
Capitec Bank chief executive Gerrie Fourie recently said South Africa’s unemployment rate was closer to 10% instead of the official 32.9% if Stats SA were to include those self-employed in the informal economy. Fourier argued that many people in townships and rural areas have informal steady jobs as hawkers and make a daily turnover of about R1 000.
Stats SA refuted claims that it overlooks informal sector workers, stating it follows International Labour Organisation standards to track unregistered, small-scale employment. It regularly publishes detailed reports, such as the Quarterly Labour Force Survey, to monitor this sector.
Statistician general Risenga Maluleke emphasised that official data should inform policy, not be misrepresented, and urged critics to base their arguments on evidence.
According to Stats SA, the rate of young people not in employment, education or training has increased from 38.3% to 43.2% over the past 10 years. This raises questions about the ability of the informal economy to create alternative employment.
South Africa’s youth are increasingly being left behind by the economy, with rising unemployment, hunger and crime dimming prospects for a generation that makes up a third of the population, according to Stats SA’s latest Social Profile of Youth report, which tracks the well-being of young people from 2014 to 2024.
Defined as those aged 15 to 34, the youth cohort accounts for about 21 million people, representing 33.1% of the population.
Although youth unemployment remains high, the profile of those most affected has shifted, suggesting that access to basic education is becoming less of a barrier to employment.
The share of jobless youth without a matric qualification declined by 10.3 percentage points, while unemployment among matriculants fell by 7.2 percentage points.
But the report also shows that a matric certificate does little to shield young people from joblessness. From 2014 to 2024, the proportion of youth who were employed dropped from 30.5% to 27.7%, while youth unemployment rose sharply from 36.8% to 45.5% over the same period. This upward trend in joblessness was observed in most provinces except the Western Cape.
At the same time, more youth are living in households without any employed adults. This figure rose from 21.8% to 23.8% for males and from 24.5% to 25.5% for females.
At the household level, the situation remains precarious as income from salaries and wages declined in 2023. In rural areas, reliance on social grants remained high, despite a marginal decline in their overall share of household income. Food insecurity also worsened, with the share of young people living in hungry households rising from 13.5% in 2014 to 15.8% in 2023.
“Households with no employed adults are becoming more common, which makes the intergenerational transfer of poverty more likely,” said the report.
Youth safety also deteriorated, particularly for young men. Fewer youths reported feeling safe walking alone during the day, while feelings of night-time safety remained unchanged at 34.9%. Young men aged 16 to 34 were more likely to be victims of assault, street robbery and theft than their female peers, according to the report.
School attendance increased slightly, from 74.7% in 2014 to 75.2% in 2023, while enrolment in higher education climbed by 1.3 percentage points to 13.2%. Youth with tertiary qualifications were also the least likely to be unemployed. Statistics South Africa said this reinforces the importance of continued education in an exclusionary labour market.
Enrolment in technical and vocational education and training colleges dropped slightly, while participation in adult education and training went down from 1% to just 0.04%. Stats SA noted a small uptick in home-schooling and other alternative education options, which signals growing demand for non-traditional learning opportunities.
“South Africa’s youth are better educated, but not necessarily better off,” the report concludes. The youth data raises questions about the intersection between skills alignment, the quality of work and the cost of living.
Ramaphosa said the government has ramped up funding for technical and vocational education and training colleges, including the establishment of new campuses. The presidential youth programme has also partnered with the National Youth Development Agency and the department of small business development to develop young entrepreneurs.