Invest in our youth — to avoid inequality wasting a generation

South Africa (SA) has one of the youngest populations in the world. It also has one of the highest youth unemployment rates. At the same time, corporate SA continues to warn that a shortage of skilled talent is constraining growth, innovation and competitiveness.

These are often presented as two separate crises. They are not.

They are symptoms of the same problem: an economy that reproduces inequality faster than it creates opportunity.

SA defines youth as people between the ages of 15 and 35. Yet it is those aged 25 to 35 – the years when people should be building careers, families and financial security – who are among the hardest hit. Instead of entering the productive economy, many remain trapped between education and employment, their potential steadily eroded by prolonged exclusion.

This is not because young people lack ambition. It is because opportunity remains profoundly unequal.

Where a young person is born still shapes the quality of education they receive, the networks they can access, the transport they rely on and ultimately, their prospects of finding work. By the time two graduates submit identical CVs, inequality has already determined much of the outcome.

This is SA’s real skills crisis.

Business leaders are right to identify shortages in engineering, technology, finance and other high-demand sectors. But alongside those shortages sits a generation of capable young people who cannot gain the experience employers demand because no one is willing to give them a first opportunity.

An opportunity shortage

In many respects, SA does not have a skills shortage. It has an opportunity shortage.

The labour market has become caught in a vicious cycle. Employers compete for experienced professionals while expecting graduates to arrive work-ready. Yet experience is not found; it is created. Every organisation that refuses to invest in young talent contributes to the very skills shortage it later complains about.

The consequences extend far beyond unemployment statistics. Youth unemployment is one of the most powerful engines of inequality. Without work, young people cannot build assets, develop careers or achieve economic independence. Delayed employment becomes delayed wealth creation, reduced social mobility and entrenched poverty.

This is no longer simply a social issue. It is an economic one.

Corporate SA cannot continue to treat skills development as a compliance exercise or a corporate social investment programme. Developing young talent is a business imperative. Likewise, government cannot address education, industrial policy and employment in isolation. The transition from learning to earning must become a national priority.

Until we dismantle the structural barriers that exclude young people from meaningful economic participation, youth unemployment and skills shortages will remain two sides of the same inequality. SA’s future competitiveness will depend not on finding more talent, but on finally unlocking the talent it already has.

The question is no longer whether SA can afford to invest in its young people. It is whether we can afford to keep wasting the country’s greatest competitive advantage – a generation whose potential remains our most underutilised economic asset.

SA’s future competitiveness requires a shared national effort in which business, government, educational institutions and civil society stop working in parallel and start working in partnership.

Corporate SA is uniquely positioned to convene these conversations, forge new collaborations and help build the bridges that connect education to employment and potential to productivity. We have seen some of our country’s leading and most influential corporate players take on this mantle to move this forward – our country needs more of this. DM