Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka

Africa has the fastest growing and largest youth population on earth. By 2050, one in four people in the global labor force will be African. Whether this becomes an opportunity or a crisis depends almost entirely on one question: can African education systems prepare young people to participate successfully in the 21st-century world of work? Currently, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka holds, too many of them do not meet the requirements of Africa’s emerging economies.

Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka knows this problem from many perspectives: As Deputy President she championed JIPSA – the Joint Initiative on Priority Skills Acquisition – a national drive to close the gap between the qualifications South Africa was producing and the skills its economy needed. The frustration was acute: graduates with degrees but no experience, and no mechanism to acquire it. Internship pathways were created; young South Africans were placed abroad. Some came to Germany. Yet, two decades later, the structural disconnect remains.

Germany's dual vocational training system – combining classroom learning with workplace experience – is one of the most studied models in the world for connecting education to labor markets. As a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka intends to understand how it works from the inside: what conditions made it possible, what it actually delivers, and what is genuinely transferable to very different contexts. She plans to engage with employers, training institutions, policymakers, and young people themselves.

As part of her fellowship, she is set to deliver concrete policy proposals for South Africa and a broader contribution to the debate about African youth and the future of work. She also brings a clear conviction about what that future requires: education that is built around problem-solving, that produces job creators rather than job seekers, and that takes young people seriously – not as recipients, but as agents.