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Every year on June 16 we celebrate young South Africans; we share their stories, applaud their resilience and fill stages across the country with speeches about our history and the possibilities that lie ahead. However, the next day the conditions that make their lives so difficult remain exactly as they were. This gap between what we speak about and what we actually build is the conversation Youth Day should be addressing, but rarely does. I spent many years in the entertainment industry before I understood that talent without structure is just potential with an expiry date. That lesson came from watching capable people, myself included, build things that collapsed. Those things did not collapse because of lack of effort, but from lack of foundation. It is that insight that has shaped my viewpoint that the problem is rarely the person but is almost always the system around the person. That is not a comfortable observation in a culture that prefers to celebrate individual resilience over institutional accountability. However, it is the only honest starting point for a conversation about what young South Africans actually need, and what we have consistently failed to give them. According to Statistics South Africa, the current unemployment rate among the youth is more than 60%. These figures do not describe a generation without ambition or capability; they describe a generation without adequate infrastructure. Research by TechnoServe found that 20%-25% of township youth are already self-starters, filling economic gaps through their own businesses, without institutional support. This goes to show that the will is not the problem, but the infrastructure is. What infrastructure actually looks like in practice: Markets before money: The instinct of most enterprise support programmes is to begin with capital. Give a young entrepreneur a grant, attach a report and call it enterprise development. But capital without a customer does not do the thing we think it does. What young entrepreneurs need first is revenue, and revenue comes from markets. South Africa spends hundreds of billions of rands annually on goods and services. An enforceable commitment to directing a defined percentage of that expenditure to youth-owned businesses would do more for youth employment than any training programme on record. Young entrepreneurs do not need to be taught how to sell, they need someone to buy, meaning government has to do something about its procurement processes that will signal that the youth are put first.Finance built for where businesses actually are: Development finance institutions were designed for a version of small business that most young township entrepreneurs have not reached, and may never reach, if they are never given the chance to grow. Redesigning access criteria around demonstrated traction — revenue consistency, customer demand and community presence rather than many compliance documents — would unlock a pipeline of viable businesses that the current system is actively filtering out. Harambee estimates that properly supporting self-starter entrepreneurs could reduce South Africa’s unemployment rate by up to 10% by 2030. However, that figure will remain a dream for as long as the finance system continues to reflect the preferences of big institutions rather than the realities of the small businesses it claims to serve. Real support for the people doing most of the work: Young women face compounded barriers; higher unemployment, lower labour force participation and deeper rates of discouragement when compared to their male peers. Yet the majority of township entrepreneurship, such as food businesses, beauty services, informal childcare and community-based trade, is driven by women. We speak about youth entrepreneurship as though it is a gender-neutral endeavour, while designing support systems that consistently fail the people carrying it forward. Closing the gap between what young women are already building and what institutions are willing to back is not a social justice appeal but the most direct and underutilised economic intervention available to us. Any serious conversation about youth employment that does not prioritise young women is not serious. The same logic applies to mentorship; the businesses that survive are consistently those with strong, sustained support networks around them and not one-day workshops or motivational appearances. It is about giving young entrepreneurs access to entrepreneurs who have built real businesses and have a track record of showing up consistently over time. The private sector possesses the capital required to provide this, but the question is whether it will treat that capacity as a strategic obligation or continue to deploy it as a calendar event. Youth Day was born from a generation that refused to accept a system designed to limit them. The generation of 1976 did not need inspiration — they needed the obstruction removed. On the other hand, today’s youth need structures built to support them. The most meaningful thing any institution, business or policymaker can do this June 16 is not to celebrate young South Africans. It is to stop making them prove they deserve to be backed and start building the conditions under which what they are already building can actually work. That is the difference between a country that honours its youth and one that merely commemorates them. Nyawose, an entrepreneur and business consultant, is the founder of Building Well Consultants, which supports entrepreneurs to build and grow sustainable businesses.
