Community organisation amandla.mobi supports Youth Capital’s campaign, supported by over 7,000 people calling on the Finance Minister to allocate and ring-fence a budget to fund and scale youth employment. This year, the budget for the Basic Education Employment Initiative (BEEI) was effectively cut, leaving many young people unemployed [1]. This would not have happened if BEEI had a funding framework that ensured its stability. Youth employment programmes have simultaneously helped alleviate unemployment and provided support across different sectors of our society.
For example, since its inception, the BEEI programme has created over 200k opportunities annually for young people, making it one of the largest youth employment programmes ever in South Africa [2]. It gave young people an opportunity to earn income and gain work experience. It provided teachers with an extra pair of hands and people to share the administrative load. For learners, it meant they had an extra person to help with their demanding classroom tasks. Over 20,000 schools across the country benefited tremendously from that programme, and cutting it has created a huge gap in our classrooms [2].
‘Our president constantly reiterates the importance of creating jobs in this country at almost every SONA, but reducing funding for jobs is a betrayal of those sentiments. Employment programmes like the BEEI were introduced to help alleviate unemployment caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, but their success extended far beyond it. The government should build on policies that work; instead, it is dismantling them. Without these employment programs, unemployment rates will keep soaring,’ says Tebogo Gabang, awethu.mobi coordinator at amandla.mobi.
Finance Minister cannot deprioritise youth employment programmes the minute the budget becomes ‘tight’. If the government is serious about tackling youth unemployment, the budget for these programmes can not be on the chopping block each year. We need funding frameworks that will guarantee yearly funding for these projects. The mid-term budget speech is coming up on the 21st of October, and we hope that the Treasury will lean into doing the right thing by announcing an increased budget for employment programmes and reinstating BEEI funding.
ENDS
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References
[1] 200,000-plus jobs on the line as DBE seeks Treasury lifeline by Sue de Groot for Financial Mail, 13 August 2026.
[2] Bring back the Basic Education Employment Initiative — SA youth need it urgently by Zama Zulu and Stanford Ndlovu for Daily Maverick, 03 September 2026.