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Working children and young people

South Africa’s 'door knockers': young people and unemployment in metropolitan South Africa

An assessment of job creation ventures in South Africa

Authors: A. Bernstien (ed)
Publisher: Centre for Development and Enterprise, South Africa, 2008

Full text of document

Unemployment of young people aged between 15 and 24 is South Africa's primary policy challenge, and there have been various job creation schemes. This paper reports on a research project aimed at surveying and assessing current job creation ventures in South Africa. There are two main research elements. The first is a series of sample surveys in the three largest metropolitan areas – Johannesburg, Durban, and Cape Town. The second is a survey of job creation programmes in the same metropolitan areas to build a database of employment creation schemes, and to assess their efficacy.

The report asks the following questions:

  • how bad is youth unemployment in South Africa?
  • why do metros matter?
  • who are the ‘door knockers’?
  • what kinds of job creation interventions are currently being undertaken?
It is estimated that in 2005, four million young people were part of the South African labour force, which means they were available for a job. Of those, 65 per cent – or 2,6 million – were unemployed. This research confirms that much energy and substantial resources are being deployed by well-intentioned local, national, and private actors on a multiplicity of small-scale initiatives. These undoubtedly make at least a temporary difference to relatively small numbers of people. However, they are not designed to be implemented at scale, often result in large sums of money being spent on very few jobs; and are not evaluated independently.

Main findings from the report include:
  • job creation initiatives should be audited, not only in terms of financial management but also in terms of cost-effectiveness
  • anxieties about the quality of basic education are coming to the fore, especially in such growth-linked areas as maths and science 
  • the concept of further education and training adopted by the government in the 1990s was that it would offer a rich portfolio of opportunities following the completion of universal general education. This has not come to pass, and the vast majority of learners follow a path which leads to the National Certificate which is inappropriate for many 
  • artificially created jobs cannot be easily created at the scale required and are not a path for sustainable development in this country. Recognising this fact sets a challenge for both the government and the private sector, and meeting it requires a much more informed and far bolder national conversation about the choices facing the country.