Every Youth Day, South Africa repeats the same message: youth must become entrepreneurs. There is nothing wrong with that, but it has become an easy slogan that is becoming disconnected from the realities that young people face and the conditions they actually need to build a business.
Paul Smith Image supplied
There are no shortcuts around entrepreneurship education
Undoubtedly, teaching entrepreneurship matters, but South Africa needs to move beyond the idea that one entrepreneurship course or workshop is enough to transform young people into successful business owners.
Exposure can help young people understand that building a business is possible, but possibility does not equal potential, and ambition alone cannot replace the education, experience, networks and enabling environment that entrepreneurs need if they are going to build companies that last.
This distinction matters because South Africa needs to stop romanticizing the dropout founder or selling the idea to youth that dropping out of school to 'start something' is a credible growth strategy.
The more useful route is often slower and less glamorous, but far more realistic: finish school, develop strong literacy and numeracy, study further where possible, gain work experience, understand your potential clients, learn how organizations work, and then build from a stronger foundation.
The country needs more builders and problem solvers, not just more people forced into survivalist activities because the labor market has failed them. Survivalist businesses are often necessary and deserve respect, but they are not the same as growth businesses.
A young person selling for a living is not in the same position as a founder building a company that can employ 50, 100 or 500 people.
Central part of South Africa is missing
The World Bank says that small and medium enterprises globally account for about 90% of businesses and more than half of employment.
In South Africa, IFC has estimated that small enterprises employ 50% to 60% of the workforce and contribute at least 34% to GDP. Yet very few small companies grow into the medium-sized employers the country urgently needs.
Part of the problem is how quickly we burden growing businesses as if they were already large, mature companies. South Africa's revised small business definitions classify micro enterprises as those with up to 10 full-time employees, small enterprises as those with 11 to 50 and medium enterprises as those with 51 to 250, with turnover thresholds varying by sector.
But a company employing 60, 100 or 250 people is not a corporate giant. It is often still a small growth business trying to professionalize, access markets, manage cash flow, and hire well.
If South Africa wants more youth entrepreneurs to become employers, policy needs to recognize that gap. Regulation should be different for large, established firms with the capacity to absorb it, and indeed lighter, simpler and more growth-oriented for small and large businesses. Compliance shouldn't be something that stops a promising company from hiring its next ten people.
The same applies to finance, procurement and networks, as strong entrepreneurial ecosystems are not built on inspiration alone.
As Startup Genome's Global Startup Ecosystem Report shows, the competitive ecosystem depends on the interaction between funding, talent, market access, connectivity and knowledge, meaning young founders need practical routes into markets, advisors who understand scale, early customers willing to take a chance on them, and access to capital and networks that allow promising businesses to grow.
Show young people what building looks like
Young entrepreneurs also need better role models, not just celebrity founders, tenderpreneurs or Silicon Valley myths, but credible South African builders who solve real problems, employ people, serve customers fairly and create useful products or services.
As the Stanford Social Innovation Review has argued, the language of 'social entrepreneurship' can obscure a fundamental truth: the most honest, productive entrepreneurship is already social when it creates value, creates jobs and improves the services people rely on.
This conversation on Youth Day is meaningful, because entrepreneurship can only help develop South Africa's future leaders when we stop treating it as a slogan and start treating it as a system that has to be built. Y
Young people don't need any other call to work harder. They need schools that build capacity, universities that expose them to ideas and technology.
They need workplaces that provide them with experience and investors willing to support them. They need exemplary role models and a state that gets out of the way and gives small businesses a chance to grow.