I run a VC-funded technology business building across the education-to-work value chain at a time when South Africa's youth unemployment is at crisis levels. On paper, that should make this fertile ground for building an innovative and sustainable, high-growth business. Let me tell you - it's such a bad idea.
I'm writing this series of reflections, "Such A Bad Idea", as a way to practise radical accountability. The responsibility we have as founders to make the right choices requires both bravery and humility, so I want to start with the most uncomfortable question a founder can ask: Do customers actually want what you're selling? Is there a market for your service? Not the market you wish existed. The one that's actually there.
Missing jobs, youth employability, future of work, the challenge of learning-to-earning, these are not problem statements a single startup or business can carry. The creation of jobs is the result of an entire value chain: learners, educators, employers, industry associations, government agencies, and philanthropic funders operating in unison within a growing economy.
As founders operating in this sector, we build solutions across different parts of that value chain, including hiring, educational content, tracking and tracing, mental health, and skills verification etc. Perhaps one of the most critical challenges in connecting young people to jobs is work readiness: providing the experience that makes young people employable.
Here’s an unkind truth - a healthy market needs a willing buyer and a willing seller. In the youth labour market, that condition is structurally absent due to the mismatch between available skills and market demand.
Left unregulated, the market screens out this cohort of talent that is “not ready to work”. You see it spelt out on every job ad: minimum 2 years of experience. For a young person, the trap is obvious; how do I get my first year of experience if the entry requirement is already two years?
Today, AI works faster and at scale, scanning CVs and LinkedIn profiles for credibility signals that most young people haven't earned yet.
So we created demand that wouldn't otherwise exist, such as B-BBEE scorecards, YES4Youth, learnership incentives; mechanisms built to manufacture a willing buyer where the market doesn't naturally produce one. And they work, partially.
But notice that the employer isn't buying talent. They're buying compliance points, rebates, and reputation. The young person is the instrument of the transaction, very rarely the genuine object of demand—a reluctant purchase.
Now here's where it gets harder, and this is the part where we live as founders.
You'd expect the next layer up (the market for solutions that support the value chain) to behave normally. Real buyers, real budgets, providers competing on value and return. But the feeling of reluctance doesn't stay at the bottom layer. It propagates upward.
The corporate buying a youth employability solution isn't chasing the highest return on their training spend. They're satisfying a mandate: the scorecard, the SDL line, the ESG report, the same obligation that created the reluctant purchase one layer down.
The funder deploying capital isn't an investor racing to back the best solution; they're moving against a fixed mandate, a disbursement schedule, and a reporting framework. The buyers in this market buy because they have to, not because they've found the best solution and are competing to reach it.
The reluctance is inherited. It's not that any one buyer is doing anything wrong; our hearts are in the right place. It's that the conditions at the talent layer reproduce themselves, exactly, one layer up—the same broken condition, stacked on itself.
This is why the business model conversation in this sector is so topical - what does sustainability look like for operators?
A B2B buyer takes up to 12 months to close, not because they're slow, but because a compliance-driven purchase moves at the speed of budget cycles and approvals, not commercial urgency.
A B2C buyer, the learner who needs the solution most but cannot afford to pay, relies on a framework that assumes their access will be subsidised by someone operating under that same compliance logic.
And if you prioritise a B2C audience that can afford your services, you’re told to be more inclusive.
B2B, B2C, B2B2C — pick your poison.
Every layer of the market reflects that same reluctance back at you. As I said, “Such a bad idea”
So let's sit with that for 12 months. Because while the market we have that exists to solve the challenge of youth employability deliberates for a year, the problem it's solving doesn't wait - it compounds and entrenches itself.
The latest numbers from Stats SA, Q1 2026:
These numbers didn't hold steady while we were busy. They got worse.
This is the contradiction at the heart of everything we're building. We have an ecosystem full of people working tirelessly to solve the youth unemployment challenge, and a market architected to move at the speed of compliance, not at the speed of the crisis.
The very thing we're all trying to solve doesn't even create the conditions for a real market to bring the best solutions to the table with the urgency required.
So before we talk about solutions, we have to be honest about the trap. If the people who need these solutions most can't pay for it, and the people who can pay are only buying to comply, when can we really talk about winning?
Next reflection: Why does a market built to solve this move so slowly — and what would it take to change that?
