STEVEN ZWANE | Proper entrepreneurship education is SA’s missing link

As the results were announced, I was at Babson College in the US, a college widely regarded as the global epicentre of entrepreneurship education. The contrast was not merely symbolic; it was instructive. SA celebrates educational milestones with ceremony but too often fails to connect schooling to the economic realities young people face once the applause fades.

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 a sense of agency over their future. 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.

SA’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.

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And yet 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 the 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 practice daily, informally and creatively, across townships, villages and informal markets.

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