About 3.5 million South Africans aged 15-24 are disengaged from the formal economy and education system. In the first quarter of 2025, 37.1% of young people were not in employment, education, or training.
These alarming figures highlight an urgent need for youth development.
Interventions such as skills and entrepreneurship development are needed to expertly guide young people towards participating in the mainstream economy.
Designing and running those interventions requires professional youth workers.
Youth work is an emerging profession within the social services sector. It aims to promote positive youth development through young people’s voluntary participation. The expertise needed in this work includes empathy, strong communication, and advocacy skills. It’s similar to social work but its main focus is the empowerment of young people. Examples include peer-to-peer literacy support and community-based drug prevention campaigns.
For youth work to be regarded as a profession, it must be organised and subject to regulations and standards that guide practice. This involves the establishment of a code of ethics and standardised formal training in the higher education sector.
In South Africa, much of this kind of work is done by non-profit organisations. It is often performed by a mix of qualified practitioners (people with a degree or diploma in youth development) and dedicated, yet unqualified, volunteers. The country does not have a database to indicate how many youth workers there are.
It’s often treated as voluntary or ancillary work. The result is that some practitioners are poorly remunerated and the field lacks the stature and regulation of other social services, such as social work.
South Africa does have policy and legislative frameworks to support youth work. These include the National Youth Policy 2015 and the National Youth Development Agency’s
2022 Integrated Youth Development Strategy.
So, given the need for youth work and the supporting policies, why hasn’t youth work been professionalised in South Africa? As an academic who researches youth development initiatives, I wanted to understand this better. In a recent study, my co-author Doris Kakuru (a social scientist in Canada) and I asked youth work stakeholders for their perspectives on the barriers to professionalisation.
We asked a selection of 30 people involved in youth development work, including qualified youth workers, a policymaker, and youth development experts from universities. They identified three main barriers:
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lack of political will
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absence of organised spaces for the profession
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non-existence of a standardised curriculum.
Removing these barriers would result in a sector with formal ethics, qualifications and standards. This would protect the workers and the young people they work with, and make their work more effective.
South Africa’s youth work landscape
Unlike that of teachers or social workers, youth work remains unregulated. Practitioners are not required to hold accredited qualifications, there is no professional association representing them, and there is no uniform standard of practice.