South Africa’s stubborn – and tragic – problem of large scale, long term, structural unemployment, especially amongst the country’s youth, needs long term, structural solutions: radical improvements in early childhood education and basic education, re-establishing the link between technical and vocational education and training and the workplace ranking high amongst them. This useful article by two researchers from the Universities of Johannesburg and Cape Town reminds us, however, that action also needs to be – and can be – taken now, to address some of the immediate challenges and constraints facing unemployed youth.

We need to think of change, not just in ‘big bang’ terms but in terms of incremental and steady improvement. Iterative, adaptive strategies, policy learning, improved implementation may turn out to be more effective that the grand policy designs that have so conspicuously failed us.

via UJ’s development sociologist, Prof Lauren Graham highlights short term interventions to combat youth unemployment