Demand research to identify earning opportunities for youth in the tourism sector

Background and context

Tourism is a significant driver of South Africa’s economic growth and employment, directly supporting an estimated 954 000 jobs in 2024. Its service-intensive, geographically dispersed structure means it creates opportunities that are not usually accessible relative to other sectors: many roles and enterprises require modest fixed capital and rely primarily on labour, local knowledge and differentiated offerings, opening the sector to small, locally owned businesses and individual jobseekers alike.

Against South Africa’s persistently high youth unemployment (over 58% on the expanded definition), tourism stands out as a sunrise sector with substantial latent capacity to absorb more youth across formal roles and informal or self-employment pathways. Realising this potential depends on strategic intervention grounded in a clear understanding of where the sector’s opportunities and constraints lie.

Purpose of the engagement

Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator (Harambee) commissioned Nova Economics to conduct a demand-side study into earning opportunities for youth in South Africa’s tourism sector, across four sub-sectors: hotels and accommodation, air travel, conservation and hunting, and events and conferencing. The study set out to identify the most promising and immediately actionable opportunities for youth absorption into the sector, and to surface the evidence base – including the system unlocks needed – for scaling those with the greatest medium-term potential to 2030.

Our approach

We combined stakeholder interviews with a desktop review and case study analysis across the four sub-sectors:

• Stakeholder interviews: interviews with prominent employers, industry associations, researchers and skilling intermediaries across the four priority sub-sectors, to understand the roles in demand, the skills they require and what limits youth absorption into them.
• Desktop review: used to determine sub-sector sizes, contributions and trends, establish a quantitative employment baseline and forecast for each sub-sector, identify where new nodes of tourism employment are emerging, and validate interview findings against grey literature where required and available.
• Case study review: we drew on local case studies of demand-led skilling intermediaries to understand how pathways into the tourism sector can be built for the youth, and on international examples of similar programmes to identify possible routes to scale, including conversation with one local intermediary on how it saw its own programme scaling.

Outcomes of the project

The resulting evidence base sized current and forecast employment to 2030 for each sub-sector, and mapped the specific roles and self-employment pathways accessible to youth. It set out the constraints on demand and supply behind them, the unlocks required to shift those constraints and enable sector growth, and ultimately greater youth absorption. It further examined routes to scale for skilling intermediaries that specialise in developing pathways into these roles for youth, drawing on local and international case studies. These findings are intended to inform Harambee’s near-term strategy and programme priorities.