Economic exclusion of youth will only result in more chaos, instabilities

THE increasing number of young people classified as Not in Education, Employment, or Training (NEET) signals a profound structural crisis in our country. 

What was once seen as something happening at the periphery of the economy has become a national crisis. 

The NEET youth are defined as individuals between the ages of 18 and 24 who are not engaged in formal education, employment, or skills training. Which means they are neither gaining experience in the labour market, nor receiving an income from work, nor enhancing their education and skills, so their full potential is not being realised.

The significance of this category lies not in its description, but in its diagnosis. It reveals the weakening of institutional pathways that should facilitate the transition from youth to adulthood. What scholars describe as waithood, a prolonged and often humiliating suspension between childhood dependency and adult independence. 

Unlike standard unemployment measures, NEET captures a condition of systemic disconnection, a detachment from educational systems, training mechanisms, labour market networks, and social life. 

Globally, this phenomenon is linked to eroding social trust, mental health decline, and delayed life transitions.  In saturated, skill-based labour markets, young people are told to be resilient, flexible, entrepreneurial, and self-starting while at the same time they are being denied the structural support required to live up to these expectations.

This is when NEETs are produced, when education systems, labour markets, and social support structures fail to connect young people to credible pathways for learning or earning. 

According to the Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE), South Africa has over 9 million NEETs within a broader youth population of roughly 20 million aged 18–35, disconnected from both learning and earning. 

This means that close to half of the country’s young adults are functionally excluded from productive participation in the economy. Even more telling is the composition of this group: approximately 750,000 unemployed youth are graduates, around 3.7 million have matric, and 4.7 million have not completed matric. 

These crises are not merely the result of poor educational attainment; it is increasingly the result of a broken promise that education is a pathway to success, guaranteed employment, and ultimately the end to poverty. This is how structural failures become visible when even “doing the right thing” no longer delivers a reward.

NEET youth are more vulnerable to poverty, substance abuse and mental health distress, and social withdrawal. All these lead to a large-scale youth mobilization. Events such as the July 2021 social unrest mirror this problem and speak to how economic exclusion can translate into chaos and instabilities. 

When millions feel locked out of opportunities, the state’s legitimacy erodes not through rhetoric, but through lived experiences. While much emphasis is on unemployment after graduation, the most structural problem is upstream. 

South Africa’s post-school bottlenecks, where young people are blocked from accessing education and training immediately after matric, for reasons unrelated to merit.

 South Africa has only 26 public universities, an overstretched TVET sector, and limited underfunded community-college capacity. Yet the country produces enormous numbers of school leavers each year. In November 2025, more than 900,000 learners sat for matric examinations, nearly one million young South Africans seeking entry into the next phase of life. 

The post-school system simply cannot absorb them. As Higher Education Minister Buti Manamela has acknowledged, ‘even if every learner passed matric, available space would accommodate only about half’. 

This reality speaks to the story of youth exclusion. Many young people are not NEET because they reject education, but because the system rejects them. These bottlenecks create a compounding effect.

Students who miss out on placement do not vanish. They wait, re-apply, take gap years, attempt informal pathways, and in worse cases become discouraged and drop out of institutional engagement entirely. 

Each cohort then stacks onto the next, producing a growing mass of youth caught in “post-matric limbo.” Over time, this limbo becomes normalised, even though it represents a structural violation of what an education system is meant to guarantee: continuity and sustainability. 

Worse still, the alternatives offered to the excluded learnerships, short skills programmes, SETA opportunities, private colleges, and informal work are unevenly funded, poorly understood by families, inconsistently regulated, and often disconnected from real labour demands. These routes exist, but they are not coherent enough to function as a ladder.

At the centre of the crisis sits the weakness of South Africa’s post-school education and training ecosystem. TVET colleges are widely regarded as underperforming due to high dropout rates, limited employer partnerships, underqualified lecturers, and curricula that lag behind labour market realities. 

Another critical dimension of the NEET challenge lies within the skills ecosystem. This is because the education and training systems operate in silos from the labour market demands. 

Young people accumulate credentials without employable skills, then they are forcefully channeled into unfulfilling pathways. Gendered inequalities also remain profound within the NEET category. Young women are disproportionately affected by NEET status in South Africa.

A range of factors contribute to this, including dropping out of school due to teenage pregnancy, early marriage, unpaid domestic and care work, responsibility within child-headed households, and the expectation that young women will assume caregiving roles for family members. 

These responsibilities significantly limit their ability to remain in education, participate in training, or actively engage in labour markets. 

Sadly, the NEET status is most likely to become a long-term or permanent condition for these young women. This gendered pattern is reflected in the South Africa General Household Survey (GHS), which indicates that 56% of women aged 20–24 are not in employment, education, or training, and 47% for men in the same age group. 

These disparities highlight how structural gender inequalities continue to shape our current lives and deepen the NEET crisis. While a small proportion of the NEET youth appear disengaged from employment and learning, this should not be interpreted as unwillingness or idleness.

Research indicates that what is often described as “resistance” is more accurately understood as discouraged participation, shaped by repeated rejection, lack of opportunities, and eroding trust in institutions. 

In this context, withdrawal functions less as refusal and more as a rational response to limited and unreliable pathways into work or education.

Adding to the challenges outlined above are persistent failures in the funding architecture intended to support NEETs, most notably the dysfunction of the government-sponsored National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS). 

Administrative breakdowns, delayed disbursements, funding shortfalls, and instances of corruption have transformed financial aid from a mechanism of opportunity into a source of uncertainty and anxiety. 

For students from poor households, where education represents the most credible pathway out of intergenerational poverty these failures are not merely disruptive, but existential. 

Although the NEET phenomenon has been recognised and addressed through various initiatives, these efforts have not been sufficient to prevent its expansion and/or persistence. 

There is the Presidential Youth Employment Initiative (PYEI), public employment programmes, the SA Youth platform, Harambee-led matching initiatives, Youth Employment Service (YES) placements, and various public-private opportunities. 

These have undoubtedly placed some young people into short-term work and learning opportunities. However, the crisis continues to grow because these programmes largely function as mitigation measures rather than as sustainable, long-term solutions. 

They are solutions because they are visible, measurable, and marketable. But their scale is fundamentally mismatched to the structural drivers of exclusion. The view is that the NEET crisis does not persist because the country lacks capacity; it persists because it lacks a coherent system capable of moving young people from school into productive adulthood reliably, at scale, and with dignity.

Reducing NEET rates is central to our country’s development, yet we continue to miss that target, not because the goal is unrealistic, but because the state fails to match the scale of the crisis with the scale of reform required. 

It’s clear, countries that successfully reduce youth disconnection do so by expanding post-school capacity, integrating employers into training design, strengthening labour market intermediation, and aligning education planning with industrial strategy. 

Skills development cannot substitute economic growth, and economic growth cannot substitute job absorption. South Africa requires labour-absorbing growth, not only growth in GDP terms. Ultimately, South Africa faces a defining policy choice.

It can continue managing youth unemployment through short-term programmes that treat symptoms and preserve political optics, or it can pursue bold, system-wide reform: expanding post-school institutions, NSFAS, rebuilding TVET credibility, strengthening employer partnerships, scaling effective intermediation, and anchoring youth inclusion within a coherent growth strategy. 

The truth is NEET crisis is not merely a youth issue. And if our country does not rebuild the pathways between schooling and livelihood, it will not only lose a generation. It will manufacture a future in which exclusion becomes the dominant social norm, and no society can remain stable when the majority of its young people are asked to wait indefinitely for a life that never arrives.

Ramontja  is a researcher at Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation at the University of Johannesburg