The young of the world are solving their way out of the joblessness crisis

Résumé détaillé

The latest unemployment numbers make for horrible reading for South Africa’s young people, but the One Young World Summit in Cape Town last week does provide some ...

The latest unemployment numbers make for horrible reading for South Africa’s young people, but the One Young World Summit in Cape Town last week does provide some hope.

On the expanded definition (LU3) of unemployment, 72.7% of South African youth aged 15-24 are without work. Job opportunities for this 10.37 million-strong cohort fell by 160,000 on year on year, according to the latest numbers from Stats SA.

It’s brutal out there, and the world is getting harsher when not even education is providing a reliable path to employment. Year-on-year figures demonstrate rising vulnerability even among qualified cohorts: graduate unemployment increased by 1.4 percentage points (up from 10.4% in Q3 2025), while other tertiary unemployment jumped by 4.0 percentage points (from 20.8% to 24.8%).

Tom Osborn, One Young World ambassador and founder of Kenyan solutions startup Shamiri, challenges the separation between economic survival and youth mental health. He argues that the traditional promise of social mobility via formal degrees has collapsed across Africa, generating intense stress and disillusionment.

“Are we defining innovation effectively? Because you cannot convince me that we have an innovation deficit,” was what he countered Daily Maverick questions about the shortage of upward mobility for the youth of the continent.

“I work on this from a mental health angle, which is kind of crazy because most people think mental health is not a livelihood issue ... it is a livelihood issue,” Osborn explains.

“From the perspective of my dad’s generation, if you went to high school and you went to university, you’re pretty much assured of at least some middle class ... that is no longer the case.”

“I think there are three pathways for solving this. I think the first is just a realisation that we kind of need a new blueprint outside of formal Western-derived education from the perspective of livelihoods...

But he says that the challenge has come from the perspective of when governments or…

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