The role of public employment programmes (Peps) has been seen traditionally as providing temporary work as a bridge between unemployment and formal work.
But what happens when there are no jobs at the other end of the bridge? For many, this is the reality in South Africa today, where less than 10% of unemployed people actively seeking work find jobs each year.
In these conditions, self-employment is often presented as the alternative. But it is not a silver bullet. It is hard, risky and rarely sufficient on its own. In a context of poverty, there is also little room for people to experiment. The stakes are just too high.
What is missing are the systems that make it possible to take even the first steps into such activity, let alone the layered support required for its incremental growth on the path to sustainability.
Can Peps provide this missing support infrastructure? The evidence is mounting that they can.
This is particularly the case in programmes such as the Social Employment Fund (SEF) and National Youth Service, which provide part-time work for two days a week. Part of the rationale for this model is to provide people with support scaffolding through regular and predictable work, enabling them to engage in complementary livelihood activities.
In the last financial year, more than 12,000 of the 50,000 participants were engaged in complementary livelihood activity, 5,835 new micro-enterprises were established and over 6,000 existing ones received support.
For participants, this possibility starts with the value of work experience. We know this builds capabilities that enhance productivity needed in the workplace. Less well appreciated is the importance of skills such as time management, task management, teamwork and accountability for anyone embarking on any kind of entrepreneurial activity.
Working in schools, clinics, neighbourhoods, farms, waste sites, community projects and municipal services, participants gain access to information, contacts, tools, reputations and references. They see how value is created, where gaps exist and how systems function.
Many of the implementing partners take this to the next level, creating proactive links between the work in the programme and such pathways. The results are showing. In the SEF, for example, in the last financial year:
- more than 12,000 of the 50,000 participants were engaged in complementary livelihood activity;
- 5,835 new micro-enterprises were established; and
- more than 6,000 existing ones received support.
This has been driven by implementing partners taking the initiative to link worksites to enterprise support, to use procurement to seed local supply chains, and to connect participants to finance, tools, mentorship and markets.
In rural Deelpan, in the North West, for example, as part of SEF, the Seriti Institute focused on land rehabilitation and basic infrastructure. On the surface, it might have looked like a programme offering standard short-term work opportunities. But something else was happening.
As people worked together, with structured support from the programme and its private sector partners, they began identifying unmet needs: fencing, transport, food supply, waste collection and childcare. With a small, stable income from the programme, some participants pooled resources, borrowed tools and started side activities. One group began producing compost and seedlings. Another started a small transport service. Others moved into food preparation for workers on nearby sites.
Regular and predictable incomes, combined with networks and support, created the breathing space for participants to learn, to share, to experiment and to take risks.
The social value of the work undertaken through Peps is an important part of the picture. By strengthening schools, improving care, restoring land, supporting safety and more, the work builds social and community infrastructure. These are not peripheral outcomes — they are central to enabling sustainable livelihoods.
South Africa does not lack people who want to work, create and contribute
As Isaac Malevu, CFO of the Industrial Development Corporation, said at a recent SEF event: “When communities thrive, business thrives.”
When communities develop, the local economy does too. When people earn even modest predictable incomes, they spend locally. This circulation of money creates the conditions in which people can begin to make and sell at the local level. It creates the conditions in which sustainable local jobs can start to take root.
South Africa does not lack people who want to work, create and contribute. What is missing is the scaffolding that enables them to participate in economic life and to overcome the structural constraints they face.
We usually think of infrastructure as roads, ports, electricity and broadband. But in a context of mass unemployment, the missing infrastructure is also social and economic: the systems that help people move from exclusion into participation.
Peps are showing that they can help fill this gap — acting as organisational hubs that reach the most marginalised local economies, where markets are weakest and needs are greatest.
It is time to see Peps differently: not as short-term stopgaps but as having the potential to provide essential social and economic infrastructure for local development. That means designing them deliberately to amplify these roles.
Done correctly, Peps may offer a powerful instrument for supporting sustainable livelihoods at scale in a context in which there are few other instruments doing so successfully right now.
• Dr Kate Philip is the programme lead at the Presidential Employment Stimulus
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