If a large share of small businesses fail, then promoting entrepreneurship without addressing the reasons behind that failure turns Youth Month messaging into repetition rather than resolution. Entrepreneurship becomes the headline, while survival becomes the exception.
Every Youth Month, South Africa returns to a familiar refrain. Young people are encouraged to be resilient, to innovate, and to start their own businesses.
It is a message delivered with optimism and often genuine intent, but it is increasingly disconnected from the reality young people face in practice.
The challenge is not the message itself, but what is missing behind it.
We cannot continue to tell young people to start businesses in an economy with a persistently high SME failure rate, where global evidence shows that a significant share of small businesses do not survive beyond their first few years of operation.
