Higher Education and Training Minister Buti Manamela has sounded the alarm over South Africa’s deepening youth crisis, revealing that 3.4 million young people are neither employed nor in education or training. Delivering a keynote address at the Inside Education Summit at GIBS in Gauteng on Monday, Manamela described the figure as a “lived reality” that reflects a failing system. “3.4 million young South Africans are not in employment, education, or training.
That is not a statistic from a report. It is a lived reality,” he said. He added that the country was “waiting for opportunity, waiting for inclusion, waiting for a system that works”.
A ‘crisis of pathways’ Manamela stressed that South Africa’s challenge extends beyond unemployment. “Our crisis is not only unemployment. It is a crisis of pathways,” he said.
He warned that the education system was not effectively moving young people “from learning into earning… from potential into productivity… from aspiration into dignity”. Framing the education system as a “pipeline”, the minister said it was currently “leaking” at critical points, from early childhood development to the transition into the labour market. Early childhood gaps persist Highlighting early childhood development (ECD) as a key pressure point, Manamela said investment was increasing, but outcomes remained uneven.
“The first five years of life determine the trajectory of the next fifty,” he said. Despite R18.4 billion allocated to ECD and expanded access to 300 000 more children, only 42% of children are developmentally on track by age five. “Inequality is not simply reproduced later in life.
It is produced early,” he warned. Push for entrepreneurship and job creation Manamela said the education system must shift from producing job-seekers to job creators, noting that there were “not enough jobs to absorb” young people. “All 50 public TVET colleges now offer entrepreneurship programmes,” he said, with more than 47 000 students participating in 2024.
However, he cautioned: “Entrepreneurship will not thrive in an economy that is structurally closed.” On vocational training, Manamela said the country faces a shortage of skilled artisans, producing only about 20 000 annually against a demand for 30 000. “South Africa does not have a shortage of young people. We have a shortage of pathways into skilled work,” he said.
Government aims to ramp up artisan training, targeting 37 000 registrations this year and expanding work-based learning opportunities. Call for a unified system Manamela said fragmentation across the education and training system remained a major obstacle. “Our challenge is not a lack of programmes but fragmentation… This is a system problem, and it requires a system response,” he said. He urged stronger coordination between government, industry and civil society to ensure every young person has “a pathway into learning, a pathway into skills, a pathway into work, a pathway into dignity”.