Stereotypes about young jobless South Africans are wrong: what they’re really up to

HANNAH J. DAWSON|

SOUTH Africa has one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the world. A whopping 63% of its young people between the ages of 15 and 24 years are jobless. A large proportion of these young people have never worked in the formal economy.

The media frequently portray young people excluded from wage work as inactive, aimless and alienated from mainstream society. This image feeds into fears of crime, violence and social unrest in which people who are jobless are cast as a “ticking time bomb” that poses a threat to a country’s stability.

But this is a very misleading characterisation. Most analyses of unemployed youth fail to grapple with the reality that unemployment in the sense of “doing nothing” is not a feasible option for most young people.

As research in many parts of Africa, including Kenya, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe, has shown, unemployed young people use a wide range of economic strategies