The labour market people actually navigate

South Africa’s debate about work often places the permanent private-sector job at the top of a hierarchy, with every other form of work treated as a lesser substitute until the economy produces enough of what we call “real jobs”. That obscures the labour market people actually navigate.

Young South Africans move between unemployment, short-term work, self-employment, care, learning and informal earning, piecing together livelihoods from the work available to them.

Formal employment remains critical, and faster growth is essential, but even under the most optimistic scenarios the economy is unlikely to absorb work-seekers quickly enough to meet the scale of demand. The real question is whether public employment programmes (PEPs) are designed to leave people better equipped, better connected and better able to reach their next earning opportunity.

PEPs provide income where it is needed most, create work that communities value and give people too often excluded from the labour market an opportunity to demonstrate capability, gain experience and establish a record of contribution.

For young participants, service, structured experience and visible contribution can strengthen agency and improve prospects of future earning, forming part of the infrastructure that enables broader participation in the economy. At the same time, the scale of these programmes is often visible in national labour market data, helping sustain youth engagement during periods when the economy is not creating jobs quickly enough, and mitigating sharper declines in employment outcomes.

Established by the Presidency in 2020, the Presidential Employment Stimulus (PES) uses public investment to expand employment and protect livelihoods through programmes implemented across government. Alongside the Presidential Youth Employment Intervention (PYEI), it connects public employment and livelihood support to a wider system of pathways into earning.

Since its inception, the PES has created more than 2.5 million work and livelihood opportunities, including through large-scale public employment programmes in schools, social employment and other sectors. Alongside this, the PYEI has built a wider architecture for connecting young people to service opportunities, including through the Revitalised National Youth Service, led by the NYDA.

The NYS offers a particularly useful example. Led by the National Youth Development Agency (NYDA), it places young people in structured, paid community service through civil-society implementing partners. Having delivered more than 81,000 service opportunities through earlier phases, its latest phase aims to recruit at least 100,000 young people into structured community service.

Participants contribute in areas such as food security, learner support, early childhood development, sport, social support and community safety while gaining practical experience, occupational skills and a record of contribution. By combining service to communities with preparation for employment, further learning, enterprise or another route into earning, youth service allows young people to contribute now while building the experience, capabilities and confidence from which different futures can emerge.

The bridge must be intentionally designed

Turning a short-term placement into a sustainable pathway to earning needs deliberate design around three connected priorities:

The first is fair access. Recruitment into publicly funded opportunities should be transparent, inclusive and protected from patronage. SA Youth, the free national platform launched through the PYEI, provides young people with access to work, learning, service and enterprise opportunities. But the potential value of a platform like this extends beyond making individual opportunities visible.

At its most powerful, a pathway platform can help the system see the young person behind the application. Over time, the experience of millions of young people can help us understand which combinations of work experience, support, skills, networks and opportunities help people move forward, where they become stuck, and what intervention might help them take their next step. It creates the possibility of moving from a system that repeatedly asks young people to start again, to one that increasingly understands the journey they have already travelled.

The second is programme quality, which is an economic outcome rather than an administrative detail. Participants need meaningful responsibilities, capable supervision and work that creates genuine value. By the time they leave, they should have practical skills, credible references, records of work and other portable signals that can carry that experience into future opportunities.

The third is a credible next step. Depending on the individual, that may be employment, further learning, enterprise development, another period of public work or way of making a living closer to home. This is where the intelligence created across a pathway system becomes valuable: not simply showing a young person what is available but increasingly helping illuminate what might make sense next.

The value created by public employment reaches across participants, communities and the wider economy. Stronger schools, care services, environmental restoration, safer neighbourhoods and local development, alongside income, experience and a firmer foothold in economic activity. Its contribution lies in this combination of social, economic and developmental value.

Gift Ramapala’s journey traces one such path. After a prolonged period of unemployment, he found an opportunity through sayouth.mobi and joined the Basic Education Employment Initiative as an Education Assistant. The placement gave him workplace experience, greater financial stability and exposure to a structured working environment. While working at the school, he identified opportunities in the digital economy and founded Tech and Tag. Early support from the school helped him secure projects, while later funding from the National Youth Development Agency enabled him to buy equipment and establish a photography studio.

Business development training through the MTN Accelerator Programme strengthened his network and entrepreneurial skills. His journey did not follow a straight line from public employment into a permanent job. It moved from access to experience, from experience to enterprise, and towards the ambition to create work for others.

No single programme could have supported that progression on its own. Public employment established a record of contribution; digital systems made the opportunity visible; enterprise support provided finance; and training strengthened his capabilities and networks. Viewed institution by institution, these can appear to be separate interventions. Viewed through Gift’s experience, they form a pathway.

The next frontier is therefore not simply to create more opportunities, important as that remains. It is to connect them so that the system can see the journey a young person is making. A platform such as SA Youth creates the possibility of understanding what support someone like Gift has already received, recognising the capabilities and experience he has accumulated, and using the experience of millions of other young people to illuminate what his next opportunity might be.

That is what a genuinely integrated pathway system should ultimately do: not require Gift to find his way through a fragmented landscape of programmes but enable the landscape to organise itself around his journey. When government, business and civil society can combine opportunities, experience, skills, finance and labour-market intelligence in this way, a public employment placement becomes more than a temporary intervention. It becomes one part of a bridge to sustained earning.

The measure of that system is ultimately simple: can it see Gift, understand how far he has travelled, and help him see where he can go next?

Mosuoe Sekonyela and Ndumiso Kubheka will explore this topic further at the SA Youth National Leadership Convening 2026, where leaders from across government, business and civil society will reflect on how they can work together to reduce youth unemployment and accelerate pathways to earning.