In January every year, South Africa pauses to take stock of its future as the National Senior Certificate results are released. Across the country, families celebrate hard-won passes, distinctions circulate on social media, and schools proudly showcase their top achievers. These moments matter. They reflect perseverance in a system that routinely asks young people to succeed against formidable odds.
Yet as this year’s results were announced, I was thousands of kilometres away, attending an international symposium on entrepreneurship education at Babson College in the United States. This is an institution widely regarded as the global epicentre of entrepreneurship education. The contrast was not merely symbolic, it was instructive.
South Africa celebrates educational milestones with ceremony, but too often fails to connect schooling to the economic realities young people face once the applause fades. Each year, close to 900 000 learners write matric. Roughly 650 000 obtain the certificate. Fewer than half of those achieve Bachelor-level passes, and only a portion of that group will find a place in public universities, which can accommodate just over 200 000 first-year students nationally.
For the majority of matriculants, particularly those from township and rural communities, a certificate no longer guarantees a job, a viable pathway into the economy, or even a sense of agency over their future. This approach was appropriate in a labour-absorbing economy. It is increasingly misaligned with current realities.
This is not a critique of learners, nor an indictment of teachers and schools working heroically under constrained conditions. It is a warning to policymakers, business leaders, and society at large: we are still educating young people for an economy that no longer exists.
South Africa’s education system serves more than 13 million learners, supported by nearly half a million educators across some 25 000 schools. It is one of the largest and most complex systems on the continent. Yet its success is still measured primarily by throughput rather than by whether young people are equipped to navigate a labour market characterised by low absorption, high youth unemployment, and limited formal opportunity.
Our national conversation remains fixated on pass rates, distinctions, and league tables. These indicators matter, but they conceal a fragile system. We rarely ask the harder question: what capabilities are we equipping young people with to navigate uncertainty, create value, and build livelihoods in a volatile economy?
At this year’s Price-Babson Symposium for Entrepreneurship Educators, one insight was repeated with striking consistency: entrepreneurship is not a subject, it is a method. It is the discipline of acting under uncertainty, recognising opportunity where others see constraint, and building with what one has, where one is.
This mindset is not confined to Silicon Valley. It is precisely the logic South African youth already practise daily, informally and creatively, across townships, villages, and informal markets. Yet despite this lived ingenuity, South Africa’s participation in early-stage entrepreneurship remains uneven and fragile, fluctuating sharply year to year, and lagging behind what is needed to absorb large cohorts of school leavers.
South Africa produces remarkable young people. Each year, matriculants overcome inequality, resource gaps, and social pressure to succeed academically. They deserve recognition not only for passing exams, but for their resilience. But recognition without transformation is hollow.
If we are serious about honouring these young people, we must equip them with more than certificates. We must develop capability: the confidence to act, the skill to experiment, and the permission to imagine multiple futures beyond formal employment.
Entrepreneurship education is often misunderstood as an attempt to turn every learner into a business owner. That view is wrong and dangerous. Properly understood, entrepreneurship education develops agency, adaptability, ethical value creation, and problem-solving. It prepares young people to be job creators and job shapers, innovators within organisations, builders of communities and resilient economic actors.
At Babson, entrepreneurship is taught through action. Students test ideas, experience failure, reflect deliberately and try again. Learning comes from doing. Contrast this with a schooling model that rewards compliance, memorisation, and risk avoidance. We teach young people to fear mistakes in a world that increasingly demands experimentation.
The risk is clear. South Africa is producing generations of well-schooled yet economically disempowered youth, credentialled, hopeful, and stranded.
Entrepreneurship education cannot remain an afterthought. It must be integrated deliberately and progressively, beginning in basic education. This does not mean displacing mathematics or science. It means teaching through entrepreneurship, using real-world problems and community contexts as learning laboratories.
If South Africa is serious about prosperity, inclusion, and dignity, three shifts are urgent – and business has a central role to play. Entrepreneurship education must be integrated across the schooling journey as a method, not a module. Educators must be trained, supported, and trusted to facilitate experiential learning. And stronger bridges must be built between education, communities, and the economy, with business opening classrooms to real economic problems, value chains, and lived entrepreneurial experience.
Business has a clear stake in this challenge. Firms facing skills shortages, low productivity and constrained market growth cannot afford an education system disconnected from economic participation. Treating education as a narrow CSI concern underestimates its role as economic infrastructure.
A more coherent approach would embed entrepreneurship as a learning method across the schooling journey, invest in educator capability, and strengthen institutional links between schools, communities, and the economy. This includes exposing learners to real-world value chains, entrepreneurs, and economic problems.
Standing at Babson, surrounded by educators from across the world, one conclusion became unavoidable: countries that thrive will be those that equip their young people to act, not merely to qualify.
Celebration is important. But transformation is essential. If we get entrepreneurship education right, matric results will no longer mark an ending, but the beginning of multiple, credible futures.
Dr. Steven Zwane is a senior lecturer in entrepreneurship at GIBS, a Nelson Mandela scholar & ALI fellow, and author of Rising from the Township.
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