With South Africa’s youth employment crisis deepening, Stats SA’s latest Quarterly Labour Force Survey shows that only 5.6 million of the country’s 20.9 million young people aged 15 to 34 were employed in Q1 2026. A further 4.7 million were unemployed, while 10.6 million were outside the labour force entirely. That means 51% of young South Africans were not even participating in the labour market, 22% were unemployed, and just 27% had work. The chart captures the scale of the crisis. South Africa is not merely failing to create enough jobs for the young. It is producing a generation that is being pushed outside the economy altogether.