Unemployed youth: ‘time bombs’ or engines for growth?

While popular narratives about success in South Africa focus on individual effort, accidents of birth continue to determine life prospects. Inequalities in early childhood development, health, and education narrow the range of possibilities that young people have available to them, and this impacts on their risk appetite, including, through the workings of the maturing brain, a propensity to violence, substance abuse, and unsafe sex. New technology offers young people an unprecedented ability to organise and network. This fact, combined with high levels of youth dissatisfaction, unemployment, and marginalisation, leads many to worry that the young are “ticking time bombs”. While there certainly are risks, great unused pools of youth labour also present an opportunity for engaging them in social advancement programmes. Structured youth service is a tried and tested policy option that, when implemented as part of an integrated youth development strategy, can enlist thousands of young people in devoting their considerable energies to leadership for the public good.