During the annual Youth Day, South Africa frequently calls on young people to become entrepreneurs. Although entrepreneurship is a vital avenue for addressing youth unemployment in the country, critics argue that this approach has become overly simplistic and detached from the realities required to build sustainable businesses.
Education is more important than ambition
Despite acknowledging the importance of entrepreneurial education, simply completing a course or seminar is insufficient. The ability to run a business differs significantly from the actual capacity to build one. Ambition alone is not enough if founders lack the necessary education, experience, networks, and supportive environment to create long-term companies.
It is crucial to move away from romanticizing those who abandon their studies for a startup, claiming it is a reliable development strategy. A more realistic, albeit slower, path involves completing formal schooling, developing literacy and numeracy, pursuing further education, gaining work experience, understanding customer needs, and learning how organizations function before attempting to build on a solid foundation.
The need for problem solvers
The country requires more builders and specialists capable of solving problems, rather than merely individuals forced into survival mode due to labor market failures. While survival-oriented businesses deserve respect, they differ from enterprises focused on growth. A person selling merely to survive is not in the same position as a founder creating a company capable of hiring hundreds of employees.
Middle-tier economic challenges
According to World Bank data, small and medium-sized enterprises account for about 90% of all businesses and over half of global employment. In South Africa, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) estimates that small businesses provide between 50% and 60% of the workforce and contribute at least 34% to GDP. However, too few small firms transition into medium-sized employers, which the country urgently needs.
Part of the issue is that growing companies are burdened too early with requirements typical of large, mature corporations. Amendments to South Africa's small business definitions classify micro-enterprises (up to 10 employees), small enterprises (11 to 50), and medium enterprises (51 to 250), with varying revenue thresholds depending on the sector. Nevertheless, a company with 60, 100, or even 250 employees is not a giant but often a small, growing business striving for professionalization, market access, cash flow management, and skilled recruitment.
The necessity of flexible policy
If South Africa wants more young entrepreneurs to become employers, policy must recognize this distinction. Regulation should be different for large, established firms capable of absorbing it, and lighter, simpler, and growth-oriented for truly small and scaling enterprises. Compliance should not become an obstacle for a promising company when hiring its next ten employees.
Similar principles apply to finance, procurement, and networks, as strong entrepreneurial ecosystems are built not only on motivation. As shown by the Startup Genome Global Report on Startup Ecosystems, competitive ecosystems depend on the interplay of funding, talent, market reach, connectivity, and knowledge. This means young founders need practical pathways to market entry, mentors who understand scaling, early customers willing to take risks, as well as access to capital and networks that allow promising companies to grow.
Examples of successful building
Young entrepreneurs also need higher-quality role models: not just famous founders, tender entrepreneurs, or Silicon Valley myths, but authoritative South African builders who solve real problems, hire people, serve customers honestly, and create useful products or services.
As stated in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, the concept of 'social entrepreneurship' may mask a simple truth: much of honest and productive entrepreneurship is already social activity when it creates value, jobs, and improves services upon which the population depends. This is the kind of discussion that should take place on Youth Day, because entrepreneurship will help develop South Africa's future leaders only if we stop viewing it as a slogan and start seeing it as a system that needs to be built.
Young people do not need another call for intensified struggle. They need schools that build competencies, universities that introduce ideas and technologies, workplaces that provide experience, investors willing to support them, worthy examples to emulate, and a government that steps aside, giving small businesses room to grow.
