Natanya Meyer and Chris Schachtebeck are professors in the DHET-NRF SARChI Chair in Entrepreneurship Education, Department of Business Management, College of Business and Economics at the University of Johannesburg.

They recently published an opinion article that first appeared in the Sowetan on 15 June 2026.

As SA marks the 50 anniversary of the 1976 Soweto uprising, it is worth renewing a long-standing call: entrepreneurship should be taught in every school.

Not as a narrow “start a business” class, but as a core set of skills for a generation struggling to find work. The type of skills that will empower the young people to spot opportunities, work in teams, solve practical problems and recover from failure.

While elements of entrepreneurship are already taught in some subjects to a limited extent, there is room for improvement.

The stakes are hard to overstate. Young people aged 15 to 34 make up almost half of the country’s working-age population, yet their prospects are bleak.

According to Stats SA’s latest Quarterly Labour Force Survey, unemployment in this group stood at 45.8% in the first quarter of 2026, rising to 60.9% among those aged 15 to 24, and more than a third of that younger cohort were not in employment, education or training.

For advocates of entrepreneurship education like us, equipping young people to create opportunities rather than chase jobs that may not exist is central to youth development and a fitting theme for the month.

The classroom backdrop is stark. The 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), released by the department of basic education in 2023, found that 81% of grade 4 pupils could not read for meaning in any language, up from 78% in 2016, and back to levels last seen in 2011.

South Africa ranked last among the 57 participating countries, its average score falling from 320 to 288, far below the international centre point of 500.

Mathematics and science tell a similar story, with an important caveat. In the 2023 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), South Africa’s grade 5 pupils placed last of 59 countries in both subjects, even though they were assessed against younger grade 4 pupils elsewhere.

The picture was not uniformly bleak: grade 9 mathematics improved from 389 in 2019 to 397 in 2023, a trend the department welcomed, though scores remained below the 400-point benchmark for basic competence.

Those persistent gaps, researchers say, strengthen rather than weaken the case for applied learning, project work in which reading instructions, estimating costs or testing a prototype makes foundational skills purposeful and points young people towards earning a living.

For entrepreneurship specifically, the picture is discouraging. The latest figures from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), whose National Expert Survey asks specialists to rate the conditions that help or hinder business creation, give entrepreneurship education at school a score of just 3.3 out of 10 and post-school entrepreneurship education and training 4.4 out of 10.

On GEM’s scale, where a higher score signals a more supportive environment, both readings fall short of the level experts regard as sufficient, with schoollevel provision the weaker of the two. They form part of a broader pattern in which South Africa’s overall entrepreneurial environment has ranked among the weakest in the GEM sample in recent years.

Our stance is simple: entrepreneurship education is not a subject. It is a continuum, and South Africa is missing the most critical part of it. Internationally, advocates for entrepreneurship education frame entrepreneurship as a “competence” rather than a subject.

The European Commission’s EntreComp framework, used across Europe, defines it through three areas: spotting ideas and opportunities, mobilising resources, and putting plans into action ethically and sustainably. Those skills, supporters say, apply equally to science projects, community problems, side ventures and formal careers.

Finland is often cited as a model. Its schools run large-scale, hands-on programmes such as Yrityskylä (“Business Village” or “Me & MyCity”), in which sixth- and ninth-graders spend a day operating a miniature town, taking on jobs, earning salaries and running a simulated economy.

Rather than a standalone subject, it is built on the core curriculum and supported by teacher training and lessons before and after the visit; roughly 85–90% of Finnish pupils in those grades take part.

The lesson for South Africa is not to import a foreign programme wholesale but to systematise what works: clear competencies, teacher development, embedded projects and credible assessment.

Practical proposals include mapping entrepreneurial skills onto existing CAPS subjects, investing first in teacher coaching, and anchoring projects in real community problems alongside local traders, NGOs and municipalities, with stronger bridges from school into TVET colleges, university innovation hubs and public and private incubators.

The idea is not without critics. Some educators question whether pupils who cannot yet read for meaning can take on enterprise projects and warn that schools are already overloaded.

Proponents counter that project-based work, reading supplier terms, comparing quotes and writing an advert makes literacy and numeracy purposeful. That integration is precisely the point: the strongest international examples reframed how existing subjects are taught rather than bolting on a new one.

Supporters are careful not to overstate the case. Entrepreneurship education, they acknowledge, is no silver bullet for youth unemployment or the learning crisis. But it is an affordable way to bind literacy, numeracy and digital skills to real-world problem-solving and to build the confidence and creativity a young population needs.

The mindset of an entrepreneur — curiosity, problem-solving, and comfort with risk and failure — is not formed in a post-school incubator. It is formed in childhood.

As Youth Day reminds the country that change has historically been driven from the classroom, advocates say, teaching young South Africans to spot opportunities and build their own may be less a luxury than a necessity, and the cost of inaction another lost decade for the generation that can least afford it.

*The views expressed in this article are that of the author/s and do not necessarily reflect that of the University of Johannesburg.