South Africa's next global export: 10 million young minds

SOUTH Africa’s greatest untapped resource is not buried beneath our soil - it is the 10 million young people who stand at the gateway to adulthood, eager to contribute but too often locked out of the world of work.

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The debate has rightly focused on education, training, and skills. But there is a harder, less glamorous question we need to answer: how do we connect our youth to actual opportunities in the global economy?

Beyond Skills: The Access Gap

Today, the barriers facing South African youth are not only about what they know but who they can reach.

A young coder in Khayelitsha, a designer in Soweto, or a logistics talent in Durban may be technically trained, but without connections to employers in Lagos, London, or Los Angeles, their skills gather dust.

Global work opportunities increasingly sit on platforms, in distributed teams, and in fast-scaling industries that thrive on digital connectivity.

Yet our approach remains too domestic. We prepare youth for the South African labour market—which is shrinking—instead of preparing them to plug into the $8 trillion global freelance and digital economy which is set to create more than 230 million new jobs by 2035.

The Playbook for Global Access

To connect 10 million South African youth to jobs worldwide by 2035, we need a national strategy that focuses less on training inputs and more on opportunity pipelines. That requires three urgent shifts: