Mail & Guardian
Mail & Guardian

Youth Month

latest news & developments
Minister of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation Maropene Ramokgopa
YOUTH MONTH

Youth Month 2026: Building peace around migration through diplomacy and ubuntu

Commemorating the 50th anniversary of the 1976 Soweto Uprising, South Africa's Youth Month focuses on building peace around migration. The article highlights the importance of…

  • Maropene Ramokgopa
5 min read
Ill-equipped: The world we are handing our children is faster, louder and more saturated with content and contact than any generation has met this young.
CHILD PROTECTION

We call them youth; they were children

This article reflects on the legacy of the 1976 Soweto Uprising, arguing that we often mistake schoolchildren for 'youth,' and applies this lens to contemporary child protection…

  • Samkelisiwe Mnguni
5 min read
let us also focus on the teachers who stay up past midnight marking, who sacrifice weekends for extra lessons and who quietly absorb the stress so their learners don’t have to.
SOWETO UPRISING

Teaching is an act of nation building

Every learner whose life is shaped by a teacher has the potential to shift the future of this country

  • Andisiwe Hlungwane
4 min read
Leaders such as , Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu pursue power at the cost of people. (File photo)
ALGORITHMS

After the hashtags: A letter to the youth left with debris

South Africans’ history taught us the cost of inhumanity and that it was defeated by resistance, so we must not be indifferent to those building inequality in the world

  • Armand Bam
4 min read
Huawei & DOEL celebrate Youth Month with a career development workshop.
AI

Huawei celebrates Youth Month by investing in the future of its interns

‘We have to grow the local skills base, which is what we are doing with this DOEL internship programme’

  • Huawei
5 min read
Bright: Work by Sam Nhlengethwa at last year’s FNB Art Fair.
ARTICLE

Basha Uhuru under the theme 30 years of creative freedom, Dates for Joburg Art Fair, With-Out Limits at UJ

Your essential dose of art and culture

  • Lesego Chepape
  • Charles Leonard
2 min read
(John McCann/M&G)
16 JUNE

‘Only entrepreneurship can save the youth of South Africa’ from rising unemployment

The latest official data shows that youth unemployment rose by 1.1% and almost a quarter of a million young people lost their jobs in the first three months of 2023

  • Mandisa Ndlovu
3 min read
EAST LONDON

Deaths at eNyobeni tavern a wake-up call for the youth

Papama Mnqandi is a social entrepreneur and youth activist based in the Eastern Cape.

  • Papama Mnqandi
6 min read
A foreign migrant sits on his bed inside a boarded up room occupied by two people on the upstairs floor in a building in the Kwa Mai Mai area in Johannesburg, on May 14, 2020. – Over 50 people, residents of the same building and mostly foreign nationals are currently unemployed because of the lockdown imposed by the South African authorities to curb the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus. Dozens of them are unable to feed themselves, as the only charity providing them with food has not brought any in several days. (Photo by MARCO LONGARI / AFP)
16 JUNE

African youth: Empowering the continent’s greatest asset

Education is the best way to turn young people’s potential into realised achievements

  • Christine Dube
5 min read
ART

Storytelling through printmaking

The Springs Art Gallery presents the Print Portfolio Exchange Exhibition. It features original work of 25 artists commissioned by the Soweto Arts Company

  • Gugulethu Tshabalala
4 min read
About 32% of the population is unemployed; of the employed, 35.9% are in informal work; and of the formally employed, nearly 40% earn less than R3,500 a month. Photo: Phill Magakoe/AFP
DEMOCRACY

OPINION | South Africa’s youth deserve better role models

Slow transformation in the economy means there are still too few black people in top management positions that could provide positive role models

  • Khuthala Gala Holten
6 min read
EXISTENTIALISM

Gen Z: A joyful life in a damaged society

The moral dilemma of privilege has led to nihilism as well as unprecedented social justice action

  • Joseph Goldblatt
4 min read
Sam Nzima’s photograph of Hector Pieterson.
16 JUNE 1976

A portal to empathy: Photographs that change the world

It is important not to look away from visceral pictorial evidence of the suffering of disempowered people

  • Sazi Bongwe
6 min read
Fees Must Fall: South Africa’s youth did not expect to be agitating for access to education after the advent of democracy, but neoliberal ANC policies have unfairly excluded mostly black students, which has led to student militantism and disillusionment with the ruling party. (Delwyn Verasamy/M&G)
16 JUNE

Will the EFF capitalise on the ANC’s governance failures?

Good election outcomes for the party will mean Julius Malema’s dangerous racism will again receive airtime

  • Ebrahim Harvey
5 min read
(John McCann/M&G)
ANC YOUTH LEAGUE

South Africa’s youth are not ‘millennials’

Labelling them in the same way as youth in the US leads to false perceptions and misunderstanding

  • David Reiersgord
7 min read