It is time for the Government of National Unity to “think out of the box” and embrace the key reforms now urgently needed to boost growth, stimulate job-creation and create a real skills revolution in the education sector.
This is the thrust of a new report by the IRR, titled Generating Jobs and Skills for Growth and Prosperity, 2026, launched with a webinar discussion yesterday between author Dr Anthea Jeffery and IRR projects and publications manager Terence Corrigan. The report is the latest in the IRR’s Blueprint for Growth series.
Jeffery writes: “The GNU should embrace all the reforms outlined here to stimulate faster growth, encourage very much more employment, and remove the constraints inhibiting tradeable sectors with the capacity to absorb large numbers of poorly skilled people. It should act to achieve a real skills ‘revolution’ by introducing tax-funded school and TVET vouchers for the disadvantaged, so as to increase choice and efficiency.
“It should also scrap ineffective and costly SETAs, along with ‘free’ education at massified universities. Instead, the GNU should embrace the Heher commission reforms and ensure that adequately prepared university students are funded via income-contingent loans, backed by state guarantees. All these reforms are vital.”
Most especially, Jeffery argues, “tax-funded vouchers are particularly important because they link necessary state funding to essential competition in delivery”.
“Since vouchers would go to low-income individuals and their families, this would also give them a hitherto unprecedented capacity to choose between providers vying for their custom. Little could be more empowering for people long mired in poverty and confined to the margins of society.”
Jeffery notes that “vouchers could be funded by reallocating much of the country’s large – but currently ineffective – schooling budget, rather than increasing it”.
“Their introduction would greatly expand parental choice by allowing families to choose between private “for-profit” schools, schools run by non-governmental organisations, and public schools incentivised to improve their performance. In this competitive environment, all schools would have to up their game.
“Pupils would become better equipped for further studies, whether in Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) colleges, universities or elsewhere. This in turn would increase their prospects of obtaining jobs and earnings. Tax-funded schooling vouchers would thus be significantly more effective in empowering the poor than current BEE policies will ever be.”
In the 1994 election, she points out, the African National Congress (ANC) used the rallying slogan “Jobs, jobs, jobs!” to help bolster its support. Thirty-two years later, that promise remains largely unmet, especially among “born free” South Africans aged 15 to 24.
Among these young people, the unemployment rate stands at a dispiriting 62.8%. On what might now be called an “expanded” definition (based on a combined rate of unemployment and potential labour force), the youth joblessness rate is 72.9%.
As the report reveals, the joblessness rate among the working-age population as a whole is currently 33.6% on the official definition. This is one of the highest unemployment rates in the world. By contrast, the International Labour Organisation estimates that the global unemployment rate in 2026 will be 4.9%.
“Many factors contribute to South Africa’s unemployment catastrophe,” notes Jeffery. “Low rates of fixed investment and economic growth reduce the demand for labour. Coercive labour laws drive up employment costs beyond what many employers can afford. Sectors such as agriculture and mining, which ought to be able to employ many more people, are hobbled by bad policy and poor logistics.”
In addition, as the report points out, basic education is so dysfunctional that many young people (580,000 in 2025 alone) leave school without even a matric. In addition, most matriculants are so poorly prepared in literacy, numeracy, and analytical skills that they cannot cope with the rigours of tertiary education, whether in universities or in Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) colleges.
Instead of trying to overcome these major challenges, the ANC – which still dominates the Government of National Unity (GNU) – has focused for the past decade on providing “free” education for poor and working-class students.
Not surprisingly, access has increased but completion rates have remained dismal – with only 16.5% of students on average graduating with a three-year undergraduate degree within three years (the “regulation period”). Completion rates within regulation periods for three-year undergraduate degrees in STEM fields are particularly worrying, standing at 15% in physical sciences, 16% in computer and information sciences, 19% in engineering – and 11% in mathematics.
Worse still, as the report points out, substantial numbers of students never graduate at all. This has devastating consequences for hundreds of thousands of young people. Students spend years pursuing qualifications, but often have to leave in the end without degrees or certificates, without useful technical skills and without the work experience that might help them find jobs.
For these reasons, Jeffery writes, wide-ranging reform is needed.
“The ANC has thus far refused to embrace the workable solutions evident in other countries. But the ANC no longer speaks for the majority of South Africans. The GNU must now take charge and set about implementing the reforms needed to help generate jobs and skills – and to put the country on the path to prosperity.”