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:

• lack of political will

• absence of organised spaces for the profession

• 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.

The University of Venda in South Africa’s Limpopo province offers a four-year Bachelor’s degree in Youth Development and the University of South Africa (distance learning) previously offered a diploma. Many youth workers have been trained since 1999. But the field has not achieved full professional recognition: rules, ethics, formal training, standards, organisation.

To explore the reasons for this, our study used a qualitative research approach. The participants had a qualification in youth development, work experience in the sector, or teaching experience in youth development qualifications.

Our findings identified three main barriers to the professionalisation of youth work in South Africa:

The first is lack of political will. Despite policy acknowledgements, in practice there is no political commitment to regulating youth work. Respondents in our study said that individuals in positions of political authority fear that formal regulation, which would require formal qualifications, could jeopardise their own positions as “gatekeepers” in the sector.

The second barrier is an absence of advocacy spaces. Fragmentation within the sector means there is no organised, professional youth work association to advocate for regulation. Qualified practitioners are not sufficiently organised to champion their profession.

Thirdly, there is no standardised curriculum to train youth workers. This has weakened the professional identity of youth work. Universities use different programme titles (such as Diploma in Youth Development and BA in Youth in Development), making it difficult for graduates to be uniformly recognised as “youth workers”.

Strengthening the machinery of youth development must start with the formal recognition of youth work as a profession. For youth work to be regarded as a profession, it must be organised and subject to regulations and standards that guide youth work practice. This involves the establishment of a code of ethics and formal training in the higher education sector.

This step is crucial to ensuring that interventions are designed, coordinated and managed by skilled, accredited practitioners.

Benefits of recognition

Formal recognition of youth work in South Africa would deliver several benefits:

• a code of ethics to guide practices, protecting both the youth workers and the young people they serve

• formal qualifications, ensuring practitioners work with young people in an effective and professional manner

• minimum standards for all individuals working with young people in informal education settings.

The way forward

To regulate youth work as a profession in South Africa, key stakeholders, including the government and civil society, must take decisive action:

1. Establish a dedicated task team: The parliamentary portfolio committee on women, youth and persons with disabilities should set up a task team. This should be composed of senior government officials, heads of departments from institutions offering youth development qualifications, youth workers from NGOs, and experts in the field. The task force must oversee the translation of regulatory frameworks into concrete practices.

2. Standardise curriculum and qualifications: Institutions of higher education must agree on what to teach. This will ensure that graduates share a common understanding of youth development work.

3. Organise a professional association: Qualified youth workers must form an association. It could accommodate current practitioners (even those without formal qualifications), encouraging them to pursue training.

4. Prioritise youth work in academia: Staff who teach, design curricula and supervise research must have postgraduate qualifications in youth development.

5. Mandate qualifications: Qualifications should be a prerequisite for youth development positions in government departments, local government and civil society.

The professionalisation of youth work is not a mere bureaucratic formality; it is an economic and social imperative for the future of South Africa’s youth.