Author: Ms Honey Mamabolo is the Founder and CEO of Ceive Africa Group.

Date: 24 June 2026

Fifty years after the Youth Uprising of 16 June 1976, South Africa is still failing too many of its young people.

The youth of 1976 rejected a system that excluded them from knowledge, dignity and economic life. Today, the form of exclusion has changed, but its scale remains devastating. According to Statistics South Africa’s Quarterly Labour Force Survey for the first quarter of 2026, unemployment among 15- to 24-year-olds stands at 60.9%. For those aged 25 to 34, it is 40.6%. Nearly half of young people aged 15 to 34 are not in employment, education or training. These are not warning signs. They are evidence of a generation already being locked out of the economy.

The contrast with the Netherlands is striking. A 2025 Youth Futures Foundation and RAND Europe case study found that the Dutch NEET rate for 15- to 24-year-olds was just 3.6% in 2024 and has stayed below 5% for a decade. South Africa’s comparable reality is that one in two young people is outside employment, education or training.

The Dutch did not get there by accident. They built a system that treats youth employment as a design challenge rather than an unfortunate side effect of the economy.

South Africa cannot copy and paste that model. Our history, geography, institutions and labour market are different. But the Dutch experience still matters because it shows what becomes possible when education, employers and the state are deliberately aligned. It offers South Africa not a template, but a mirror.

What the Dutch got right

The Dutch lesson starts with structure, not slogans. Three features of the Dutch system stand out.

Feature 1: Vocational education as a first-choice pathway, not a consolation prize

In the Netherlands, vocational education is treated as a pathway to dignity, not a route for those who could not make it elsewhere. Nearly 70% of Dutch 16- to 19-year-olds attend MBO schools, the middelbaar beroepsonderwijs, or intermediate vocational education colleges, which are described as the backbone of the Dutch economy. The dual pathway, where students spend at least 60% of their learning time in a real workplace, is not peripheral to the system. It is the system. By the time a young Dutch person turns 19, more than half already have substantive workplace experience through apprenticeships, creating a smooth transition from education into employment. Employers are not passive recipients of graduates. The Dutch Foundation for Cooperation on Vocational Education, Training and Labour Market provides a formal, institutionalised mechanism for employers to shape curriculum content and ensure labour market relevance actively. Education and industry speak the same language because the system insists that they must.

Feature 2: Decentralisation with real accountability

Youth employment policy in the Netherlands operates through a coordinated framework of 35 labour market regions, which facilitate consistent national strategic direction while enabling flexible local implementation. Local councils provide tailored support, including career guidance, mental resilience training, financial literacy and subsidised employment, treating the young person as a whole human being, not merely a labour market unit. This is not laissez-faire localism. It is coordinated flexibility. National strategy sets the direction. Municipalities hold the relationships, the contextual intelligence and the accountability for outcomes. The young person does not fall through the cracks because the system is designed so that there are no cracks to fall through.

Feature 3: Making it worth the employer’s while

Training young people is necessary. Ensuring employers have a tangible reason to hire them is equally necessary, and the Dutch understand this distinction. Rather than simply producing graduates and hoping the market absorbs them, the Dutch system actively reduces the cost and risk to employers of hiring at the entry level through wage subsidy schemes and structured incentives. Employer participation is not an afterthought. It is institutionalised, sustained, and directly tied to outcomes. The system aligns the interests of the state, the young person, and the employer around a shared goal, and it deliberately funds that alignment.

South Africa’s structural reality

This is where the Dutch mirror becomes uncomfortable. The Dutch model assumes a foundation of institutional integrity, well-functioning municipalities and an economy growing fast enough to absorb trained youth into real jobs. South Africa does not yet have all three. That matters because the lessons must be translated, not transplanted. South Africa’s economy has grown at an average of only 0.7% annually over the past decade, leaving real per capita income at 2007 levels. Without growth, supply-side interventions such as better schools, more Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) colleges and expanded National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) funding are necessary but insufficient. You cannot train your way into jobs that do not exist.

South Africa’s economy has grown at an average of only 0.7% annually over the past decade, leaving real per capita income at 2007 levels. This weak growth means the economy fails to absorb new entrants to the labour market, regardless of how well trained they are. Without growth, supply-side interventions such as better schools, more Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) colleges and expanded National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) funding are necessary but insufficient. You cannot train your way into jobs that do not exist. 

Vertical skills mismatch, where qualifications do not match job requirements, is a major, well-documented contributor to youth unemployment in South Africa. Many young people progress through schooling without gaining sufficient competence to meet the demands of the labour market. This is a systems problem, not an individual failure. South Africa already has an architecture designed for exactly this purpose. The Sector Education and Training Authorities (SETAs) were established to serve as a bridge between industry and education, ensuring that what young people learn reflects what the economy actually needs. That intention mirrors the Dutch model precisely. The challenge is that governance failures, fragmentation across 21 separate authorities, and persistent misalignment between training offerings and labour market demand have undermined that mandate. The lesson from the Netherlands is not that we need a different institution. We need the institution we already have to function as it was designed to. Urgent reform of the SETA architecture, with stronger employer co-design, transparent accountability and consolidated oversight, is not a critique of the concept. It is a commitment to finally realising it.

The spatial dimension compounds everything. The legacy of apartheid spatial planning means millions of young people live far from the urban centres where most jobs are concentrated. A young person in Limpopo or the Eastern Cape cannot simply commute to an apprenticeship in Johannesburg. Geographic exclusion is economic exclusion.

According to Stats SA’s QLFS Q1 2025 data, 58.7% of the 4.8 million unemployed youth had no previous work experience, and approximately 1.9 million young people aged 15 to 34 were classified as discouraged work-seekers, people who have given up looking entirely. Discouragement is not laziness. It is a rational response to a market that has repeatedly said no.

Gender makes the picture sharper still. The female NEET rate for those aged 15 to 24 has remained consistently above the male rate, with the gap reaching 3.2 percentage points in Q1 2026. According to Stats SA, while young men are edging toward the labour market, young women are moving further away from it. Any solution that does not centre young women is not a solution at all.

Five lessons South Africa can adapt.

So what should South Africa actually do? Five practical shifts stand out.

First, make vocational education a mainstream route into work, not a fallback option. South Africa should reposition TVET colleges as credible, employer-linked institutions that lead directly to decent jobs. That requires more than additional funding. It requires curriculum redesign with employers at the table from the start, compulsory workplace-based learning in priority sectors, and public campaigns that challenge the stigma attached to vocational pathways. The current SETA architecture must be reformed to support this shift, with stronger employer co-design, transparent accountability and consolidated oversight. Governance failures cannot be allowed to continue consuming the resources meant for the young people this system exists to serve.

Second, turn municipalities into accountable youth employment delivery hubs. South Africa should move beyond district development models and local economic development frameworks that exist mainly on paper. Municipalities must be equipped, funded and measured against their ability to connect young people to career guidance, training, psychosocial support, transport solutions, internships and local job opportunities. The Dutch lesson is that local institutions matter because they know where young people are, what barriers they face and which employers are close enough to make opportunities real. The test should not be whether a municipality has a plan, but whether young people can access a working pathway through it. 

Third, reduce the cost and risk of hiring young people. Supply-side investments in education and training must be matched by demand-side incentives that make employers willing to create entry-level opportunities. The Employment Tax Incentive exists, but its reach and impact should be scaled, targeted and independently evaluated. Employers who hire, train and retain young people, especially those without prior work experience or those who have been outside the labour market for extended periods, should face materially lower costs for doing so. Incentivising youth hiring is not a subsidy for business. It is an investment in a generation. 

Fourth, actively find, track and support young people instead of waiting for them to register. In the Netherlands, an unemployed young person is actively engaged by a careers adviser and offered a personalised pathway, a job, training or a combination of both, for as long as they need it up to age 27. South Africa does not yet have the institutional infrastructure to run a guarantee of this kind on a national scale. But provinces and metros can start now by building youth outreach teams, using schools, clinics, community organisations and digital platforms to identify young people who are not in employment, education or training, and linking them to tailored support rather than one-size-fits-all programmes.

Fifth, put job-creating growth and governance reform at the centre of youth employment policy. The Dutch model works within an economy where jobs exist to absorb trained youth. South Africa’s youth employment crisis will not be resolved by skills development alone. Government must treat energy security, infrastructure investment, a functioning logistics network, faster public procurement, and a regulatory environment that encourages private-sector job creation as youth employment interventions in their own right. At the same time, institutions responsible for youth training and placement must be held to measurable outcomes. Skills without jobs are hope without a destination.

A generation cannot wait.

This is not a future crisis. It is the present one.

Over the past decade, South Africa’s youth unemployment rate climbed from 36.9% in early 2015 to 46.1% for the 15 to 34-year-old cohort in 2025. That is not a blip. It is a trajectory. And without decisive, coordinated intervention, it points in only one direction.

The Netherlands did not solve youth unemployment through a single programme or a single administration. It built an ecosystem over decades: a coherent relationship between education, employers and the state; a vocational system that produces workers the economy actually needs; and a welfare architecture that supports young people as whole human beings, not just labour market statistics.

South Africa has the policy frameworks. What we need is the institutional courage to implement them with discipline, coordination and genuine accountability.

Fifty years after the youth of 1976 took to the streets demanding the right to learn and to belong, we owe this generation more than frameworks and good intentions. We owe them a system that works. A country that cannot give its young people a pathway to a dignified working life is borrowing against a future it may not be able to repay. The time to act is not when the numbers worsen. The time was yesterday. Today will have to do. 

Sources:

1. Statistics South Africa, Quarterly Labour Force Survey Q1 2026 (statssa.gov.za)
2. Statistics South Africa, Social Profile of South African Youth 2014-2024 (statssa.gov.za)
3. Youth Futures Foundation / RAND Europe, What Works in Reducing NEET Rates: The Netherlands, November 2025
4. Statistics South Africa, Youth and the Labour Market Q1 2025 (statssa.gov.za)