By Nicola Galombik, Executive Director Yellowwoods Holdings, and Yellowwoods Social Investments. She was an original founder and board chair of Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator. She is currently a co-chair of the B20 working group on Employment and Education and serving as a member of the World Bank’s high-level Advisory Committee on jobs in the Global South. Nicola is also the B4SA focal area lead for the Business-Government partnership on Youth Employment.
Bold South African innovation
For the first time, an African nation is at the helm of the G20, and it is going beyond just setting the agenda: South Africa is going to use this platform to tell a powerful story – one that speaks to the heart of global inequality, mismatches in the labour market and the untapped potential of youth. With the theme ‘Solidarity, Equality, and Sustainability’, this year’s summit represents a diplomatic milestone but, more importantly, a call to action. At the centre of this call is a bold South African innovation: a public-private partnership, led by the Presidential Youth Employment Initiative – and jointly implemented by business and government – that is not only tackling youth unemployment but reshaping how countries think about skills, opportunity, and inclusive growth.
The global challenge : a generation at risk
Young people are being left behind across the globe. Despite technological advances and economic growth, youth unemployment remains stubbornly high. In many countries, especially in the Global South, the number of youth not in education, employment, or training (NEETs) is also on the rise, threatening social cohesion and economic stability.
In South Africa, the situation is particularly stark with a youth unemployment rate of 56.3% (18-34)1Quarterly Labour Force Survey, Quarter 1: 2025.. Of the million young people who enter the labour market each year, only 40% find work in the short to medium term, and nearly 50% are likely to join the pool of NEETs. Economic growth is essential to addressing unemployment, but even when the economy has grown, and jobs numbers grown, youth employment has not. The disconnect between education, skills, and the labour market has created a generation whose potential is being squandered.
Sharing South African solutions with the world
In the face of this crisis, South Africa is at the forefront of forging solutions to tackling it. As the G20 host, South Africa can showcase a blueprint for battling youth unemployment through public-private partnerships, to drive systemic change, especially when backed by inclusive policies, relevant technology and innovative funding models.
The B20 working group on Employment and Education has prioritised youth employment and one of its recommendations are that the G20 summit explore how South Africa’s tech-enabled National Pathway Management Network (NPMN) model can be adapted across their nations.
The SAYouth network platform, as the backbone of the NPMN, ensures we can match and link young work seekers to earning opportunities, collect real-time data on young work seekers, and co-ordinate and focus our efforts and investments to support them.
Scaling up through innovative funding models
All of these levers need innovative funding models that blend market-based models with catalytic, philanthropic capital and government funding. If we can do this, we can scale up interventions that are working and innovate new solutions that can significantly move the dial on reducing youth unemployment.
An exciting development is the establishment of the SA Youth Trust, aimed at institutionalising and co-funding the operations of the NPMN and the SA Youth Platform into the future, to ensure it is strengthened and sustained through a combination of public and private sector funding.
A moment of opportunity
Let us use the 2025 G20 Summit as a moment for renewal and collective action. With the right partnerships, policies, and platforms, and well-co-ordinated, joined-up efforts, we can meet our 2030 goals to reduce youth unemployment and turn a generation at risk into a generation of opportunity.
THE NATIONAL PATHWAY MANAGEMENT NETWORK AND THE SA YOUTH NETWORK PLATFORM
South Africa’s National Pathway Management Network (NPMN) – launched in 2020 under the auspices of the Presidential Youth Employment Intervention (PYEI) – coordinates government, private companies and civil society actors into a national network supported by a multi-faceted network platform, SAYouth. It is a free, mobile-first network for work-seekers and connects young people to jobs, demand-led skilling and enterprise support services, while addressing barriers like transport, data costs, and lack of networks to help them pathway to earning and get a foothold in the economy.
The platform is managed by the Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator and supported by the Department of Employment and Labour and private sector businesses and donors. Since its launch, 4.8 million+ young work seekers have been supported, 1.8 million work opportunities have been secured, and R34 billion in income has been generated. The inclusive nature of the platform also means that it reaches an impressive 28% of all South African youth and specifically targets those from lower income and economically excluded households and of its users, 65% are young women. In any year, over 1.5m of these young work seekers are actively engaged and supported. This is critical as data also shows that the more time young people spend on the platform, the higher their chances of finding work and generating a livelihood.
Reducing youth unemployment
Guiding the Pathway Management Network is a national strategy to tackle youth unemployment. It recognises the potential to reduce youth employment by 10-20 percentage points by 2030 assuming the country’s growth rate remains between 1% and 3%. It also hinges on business, government and social partners rallying around four key levers which, if applied at scale, could reverse the unemployment crisis:
- The first is to increase the rate of inclusive hiring of youth by big and small employers that have job vacancies. Many employers in retail, hospitality, financial and other services, are stepping up, ensuring their hiring practices are inclusive and prioritise young South Africans. Demand-led skilling and outcomes funds for this are ensuring that investment in skill translates into employment. Programmes that get young people “work-ready” need to scaled and linked into the SAYouth network.
- The second is unlocking youth jobs in sunrise sectors like tourism, digital, global business services, ECD and the green economy, and value chains like agro-processing, e-commerce platforms and infrastructure repair and maintenance.
- The third focus is on encouraging and enabling more young people to pursue self-employment and enterprise. South Africa urgently needs to enable and grow its informal and micro-enterprise economy. There are many programmes across government, business, and NGOs to support young people to start viable businesses, but we need to speed up the scaling up of these interventions.
- The last lever requires the optimisation of public employment programmes as well as business-led initiatives like the Youth Employment Service, which provide vital first work experience and on-ramps for young people, including in the country’s ‘jobs deserts.’