Beyond the bootstrap narrative: Reframing youth entrepreneurship in SA as a social justice imperative

Why are young people being asked to solve, largely on their own, a crisis that systems created and continue to sustain?

There’s something difficult about telling young people who have faced systemic barriers to opportunity that entrepreneurship is the answer to their exclusion. Yet that is exactly what society continues to do, only with better branding. The message is packaged through pitch competitions, motivational speeches and polished incubator programmes filled with words like “potential”, “disruption” and “grit”. Then young people, especially Black youth from townships, rural areas and underfunded schools, are asked to innovate their way out of a system that was never built to include them.

I am not making an argument against entrepreneurship.

Across South Africa, young people have built remarkable ventures with very little, and that achievement deserves recognition. But the more urgent question often disappears beneath the spectacle of pitch days and innovation hubs. Stripped of its branding, that is what the “more entrepreneurship” agenda demands: it recasts a failure of policy and political will as opportunity and shifts the burden onto those least able to bear it.

None of this is to suggest the government has done nothing. There are genuine successes worth naming; incubators that have produced real businesses, funding schemes that have put capital into deserving hands, skills programmes that have moved young people into work. The question is not whether something is working; it’s whether any of it is close to enough, given the scale of what young people are up against.

South Africa’s youth unemployment rate rose to 62.4% among those aged 15 to 24 in Q1 2025, the highest level since 2022. For those aged 15 to 34, the official rate reached 46.1%, an increase of 9.2 percentage points over the past decade.

These figures are repeated at conferences, in ministerial speeches, and across funding proposals. They are invoked with gravity and then used to justify a familiar response: teach young people to code, hand them a business plan template, connect them to a mentor.

The numbers worsen, but the prescription remains remarkably unchanged. That repetition should itself raise questions.

What is discussed less often is how unevenly this crisis is distributed.

In the Eastern Cape, youth unemployment reached 54.3%, while the youth labour force participation rate fell to 39.8%, meaning fewer than four in 10 young people were even attempting to enter the economy. By Q3 2025, about 3.5 million young people aged 15 to 24 were not in employment, education or training.

These concentrations are not accidental, they map directly onto the provinces most shaped by apartheid’s homeland architecture, by deliberate underdevelopment, by spatial displacement and by the systematic stripping of economic possibility across generations.

The geography of unemployment is, in many ways, still the geography of apartheid.

Why this is a justice question

Viewing youth entrepreneurship through a social justice lens forces different questions into view. The issue is not only how to help young people start businesses, but why so many in certain communities have no viable alternative to self-employment in the first place. The issue is not only what skills young entrepreneurs lack, but what structural barriers have kept those skills out of reach for so long.

Framing matters because it determines where responsibility rests. At present, the dominant framing allows too many powerful institutions to evade accountability.

The answers are uncomfortable.

They point to financial networks that Black young people have historically been shut out of. They point to procurement systems that, despite BBBEE legislation, continue to favour established players with established relationships. They point to a digital divide that means phrases like “the future is digital” land very differently in Sandton than they do in Lusikisiki.

These are not abstract forces or background conditions. They are specific, nameable mechanisms that reproduce disadvantage at scale, and they do so regardless of how talented or determined or hardworking any individual young person happens to be.

Fixing the person, not the system

The dominant approach to youth entrepreneurship programming locates the problem, and therefore the solution, in the individual. This is what gives society skills workshops, pitching bootcamps, mentorship matching and lean canvas training. None of these is inherently wrong. But they all rest on the same diagnosis: that the young person is lacking something, and that if it is provided, their potential will finally be unlocked.

A structural diagnosis says something quite different. It says that the young person is navigating a system that lacks equity, and that until that changes, society is simply asking individuals to carry the full weight of a collective failure.

Consider a young woman in Mthatha with a viable concept, evident talent and several completed workshops behind her. She cannot secure a bank loan because she has neither credit history nor collateral – not because she lacks discipline or ambition, but because her family was dispossessed long before intergenerational asset transfer was possible. Her immediate market has limited purchasing power. The roads that connect her to opportunity are inadequate. The buyer and investor networks that entrepreneurs in urban centres often inherit are largely absent where she lives.

By the programme’s own measures, she has been empowered. Structurally, however, she remains disadvantaged.

The government has projected that entrepreneurship will generate 90% of all newly created jobs by 2030. That is not optimism. That is the state subcontracting its obligations to the people it has most systematically excluded from the conditions required to meet them.

The solidarity we owe

In the enthusiasm for youth entrepreneurship, our country is in danger of substituting the aspiration for a just economy with the aspiration for a few exceptional young people who beat the odds. But a just society is not one in which exceptional individuals succeed despite structural exclusion. It is one in which structural exclusion is dismantled, so that the ordinary young person, not the exceptional one, has a genuine chance.

The structural work is not difficult to identify. It requires procurement reform with meaningful enforcement. It requires financial sector reform that treats the collateral gap as a reparative issue rather than a technical inconvenience. It requires sustained investment in township infrastructure to reduce wealth leakage and build viable local markets. And it requires accountability frameworks that measure not how many young people attended a workshop, but whether the structural conditions they navigate have materially changed.

From incubation to inclusion

Township entrepreneurs are not asking to be discovered by an incubator. They are asking for financial systems that see them, for markets they can genuinely access, and for supply chains they can genuinely enter. They are asking for the structural conditions to finally match the resourcefulness they have already demonstrated without them.

Funders also have a critical role to play. Rather than concentrating resources on short-term entrepreneurship programmes that prioritise individual success stories, public and private funders should invest in ecosystem-building interventions that strengthen local markets, improve access to finance and expand pathways into established value chains. They should also require evidence of structural impact, ensuring that programmes are assessed not only by participation numbers or business registrations, but by whether they reduce barriers to market access, capital and economic inclusion.

The young people of this country are not asking to be rescued; they are asking for a fair system. Those are not the same demand. Confusing them has already cost South Africa three decades. The task ahead is not to produce more stories of resilience in the face of exclusion, but to build an economy in which resilience is no longer a prerequisite for opportunity. DM

This article is part of a series produced by Independent Philanthropy Association South Africa (Ipasa). The articles look at issues of structural inequality and the vital role philanthropy can play, urging funders to move beyond short-term fixes and support those working to dismantle systemic inequities and drive transformative change.

• Beyond waiting for the world — how SA philanthropy can help shape our climate future
• When women lie down, a nation must stand up — GBV is a social justice crisis
• How to harness the power of social justice-oriented philanthropy for SA education

Gugu Nonjinge is marketing and communications coordinator at Ipasa. She is a South African advocacy and communications specialist whose work sits at the intersection of gender justice, climate justice and evidence-based policy influence. With experience spanning the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, Afrobarometer and the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, she has built a distinctive track record in strategic communications, policy advocacy and driving meaningful social change.