Uniting efforts to support youth empowerment

YOU have heard it said, and we will reiterate: youth unemployment remains a critical challenge in South Africa. Over nine million young people are not in employment, education, or training (NEET). StatsSA indicates that the NEET rate among 15-24-year-olds reached 37.1% in Q1 2025, up from 35.8% the previous year, affecting roughly 3.8 million young people. This crisis is rooted in South Africa's history, economy, and the systems meant to support young people. But fundamentally, disconnection persists not from a lack of resources, but from a lack of structured collaboration.

- LUVUYO MASEKO and MAPASEKA SETLHODI

Too many young people feel lost, unsure where to find support, and excluded from decisions that impact their lives. Simultaneously, numerous organisations are building parallel, albeit well-intentioned, pathways, leading to a lack of strategic coherence where energy is high, but collective progress is slow. It is time to change not only the scale of our efforts, but how we approach them.

From fragmentation to collective action

As the Schwab Foundation reminds us in their recent report, “The Future is Collective’, collective action has historical roots in social change. However, recent development approaches have become more fragmented and linear, favouring short-term gains over longer-term systemic approaches. This has left us with overlapping interventions, misaligned incentives, and little visibility into what is working and where support is most needed.

Collective action inspires a new way of operating. It is about sharing power, aligning visions, and empowering those closest to the problems. We are witnessing the potential of this approach within the youth development ecosystem. The National Pathway Management Network (NPMN), a “network of networks”, exemplifies this - connecting government, civil society, funders, and platforms to support young people’s learning-to-earning transitions. Through its ecosystem mapping subcommittee partners like Youth Explorer, the Youth Development Co-Lab, Harambee, and Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE), all are contributing to a shared, practical infrastructure for young people. This shared infrastructure, rooted in inclusion, proximity, and action, is what makes this work so effective.