Presidential Youth Employment Initiative delivers 76,000 jobs in Q4 — but it’s a drop in the ocean

The Presidential Youth Employment Intervention (PYEI) continues to deliver meaningful change in the lives of South Africa’s young people, according to the deputy minister in the Presidency, Nonceba Mhlauli.

At a media briefing on Monday, Mhlauli highlighted the initiative’s progress during the fourth quarter (Q4) of the 2024/2025 financial year, marking five years of sustained effort to combat South Africa’s unrelenting youth unemployment crisis.

During Q4 alone, 76,569 job opportunities were accessed by young people in South Africa, including 60,444 through SAYouth.Mobi and 16,125 via the Employment Services of South Africa. Additional highlights included:

• 15,137 private sector placements via the Youth Employment Service;
• 5,504 TVET graduates placed through the Department of Higher Education and Training;
• 43,000+ young entrepreneurs supported by the National Youth Development Agency and the Department of Small Business Development; and
• 2,048 young people recruited under Phase 3 of the Revitalised National Youth Service.

The innovative Jobs Boost Outcomes Fund also saw progress, with more than 5,400 young people enrolled and more than 3,000 placed into quality, sustainable jobs, with R70-million disbursed to 11 implementing partners to date.

Bleak employment stats

Three weeks ago, Stats SA released its Q1 Labour Force Survey for 2025, which revealed that the economy had shed 300,000 jobs and youth unemployment had increased to 46.1%. While the 76,000 job opportunities may alleviate the joblessness crisis for a small number of South Africans, it’s not enough to address the crisis.

“The numbers are not as great as we want them to be, but we are seeing that we are making a difference,” said Mhlauli.

The deputy minister said the recently released labour force survey showed that 132,000 new jobs were created in Q4 of 2024, and the opportunities created by the PYEI within that period contributed to the figure.

“Of course the job growth within the last quarter hasn’t been as high as the previous quarter where we had almost 300,000 new jobs, but of course, in the 132,000 jobs that we are reporting in the last quarter we can see a direct correlation between what we are doing through trying to find employment opportunities for young people and the official unemployment rate of young people,” she said.

Read More: SA’s expanding labour force caught between hope and a crumbling job market

Some young people still locked out

In his weekly newsletter, President Cyril Ramaphosa praised the Basic Education Employment Initiative (BEEI), which on Monday saw 200,000 young people return to school, this time as teacher assistants.

The BEEI, which was on hold for a year because the government failed to release the funding from the UIF Labour Activation Programme, aims to give young people work experience so they are more attractive to employers.

In May, Daily Maverick reported that many unemployed young people were vying for limited employment opportunities, resulting in an overwhelming volume of applications for the very small number of opportunities offered by the nation’s job placement programmes and initiatives.

Omphemetse Setino (24) is one of the millions of young people who applied for the latest phase of the BEEI and didn’t get a job, but still hopes to find employment.

“I applied in April and I was looking forward to actually getting a job, but I have not heard back from them, and all I feel now is disappointment,” said Setino.

Setino told Daily Maverick that a position in the BEEI would have allowed him to help his mother support their household.

“I know that you can’t get every job you apply for, but it’s been four years since I finished matric and I am still unemployed,” he said.

While he commended the government for creating pathways for employment for young people, he said more could be done.

“The only way you hear about these programmes is through word of mouth. I know so many people who are shocked when they hear the government is running a jobs programme, because the government is not communicating directly with us. They can go to malls for a political rally, but they can’t go to schools to tell us which programmes are running and where. It’s very disheartening,” he said.

Mhlauli said the Presidency was working on addressing how it communicates about programmes in the initiative, including visiting stakeholders in their communities to raise awareness.

Economic growth

While Mhlauli acknowledged that the unemployment rate overshadowed the successes of the PYEI, Tshego Walker, the PYEI programme manager, said the government had to focus on economic growth because “economic growth translates to jobs”.

Walker said the department was working on a strategy to foster meaningful job creation for young people in light of the bleak unemployment stats.

“Our sister programme, Operation Vulindlela, is implementing structural reforms that will grow the economy. It is important that, as the economy grows, young people benefit from the jobs that are created, but we have seen in the last 16 years that this hasn’t been the case. The relationship between economic growth and youth employment is a weak one. We have to make sure that we specifically focus on targeting young people and make sure that they benefit from that growth,” said Walker.

Operation Vulindlela, launched in the aftermath of the economic toll the Covid-19 pandemic had on SA, aims to reform the nation’s economy to drive growth.

In May, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced the second phase of the government-led initiative, which will focus on addressing spatial inequality to bring economic opportunities to townships and rural areas and develop a Digital Transformation Roadmap, in addition to expanding on the sector-specific reforms implemented during Phase 1.

Walker said the initiative was focusing on the following interventions to address challenges in job creation for young people:

• Inclusive hiring: The Presidency is aware of hiring practices in the private sector that don’t favour young people. Through the PYEI, the Presidency plans to shift hiring practices so that young people can benefit from new job creation;
• Supporting sectors with growth barriers: The Presidency will focus on addressing barriers to growth in specific sectors that can create jobs for young people, like the tourism industry, where international arrivals have not recovered since the Covid-19 pandemic; and
• Supporting SMMEs: Given that the current labour market cannot create jobs for the one million new entrants every year to the labour force, the government will focus on supporting young entrepreneurs to create their own pathways into employment through a Youth Hustler Fund.

Engaging discouraged work seekers

The Q4 labour force survey revealed that approximately 1.9 million young South Africans were unemployed but had stopped actively looking for jobs because they had become discouraged about the prospect of finding employment.

Walker said that by reaching young people where they live, the Revitalised National Youth Service (NYS) aimed to incentivise discouraged job seekers to re-enter the labour force.

The Revitalised NYS is a paid community programme for young people. “They don’t pay for transport to town, and it’s solving community needs. Currently, in Phase 4, we have 40,000 opportunities that are going to these young people,” said Walker.

She said the Presidency aimed to make the NYS a catch-all for young people who weren’t in training or employment, and it would function as an alternative pathway to getting this group of people engaged in the labour market.

“What we don’t want is seeing young people sitting at a corner. That is precisely what we don’t want and that is what we are trying to address through this programme,” said Mhlauli. DM