The Real South African Economy Opens Before the JSE Does

By Meso Qhobela – ORT SA Junior Marketing and Communications Manager
Every morning in South Africa, long before the formal economy has had its first coffee, another
economy is already at work.

The woman selling vetkoek outside the taxi rank has been up for hours. The young man repairing
cracked phone screens from a folding table has already answered his first WhatsApp enquiry. The
spaza shop around the corner opened before most offices and will probably close long after them.

For years, we have spoken about these businesses almost affectionately, side hustles, survival
businesses, informal traders. The language makes them sound temporary, as though everyone is
simply waiting for a “proper job” to arrive. But what if the proper job isn’t coming?

According to Stats SA, Quarterly Labour Force Survey (QLFS) Q2:2026 South Africa’s unemployment
rate reached 33.6% in the second quarter of 2026, leaving about 8.5 million people unemployed.
Youth unemployment stood at 47.4%. Nearly one in two young people in the labour force could not
find work. At some point, unemployment at this scale stops being a temporary crisis and becomes
something an economy has to be designed around. And South Africans are already designing around
it.

Micro enterprises are doing far more economic heavy lifting than their size suggests. They put food
on tables, circulate money within communities and create livelihoods in places where formal
employment has failed to reach. Some eventually employ others. Many never will. That does not
make them insignificant.

I put the question to Christopher Dickie an ORT South Africa Project Manager and Business Coach
who works directly with young entrepreneurs from underserved communities. Their response was
refreshingly free of romance.

“We are well beyond the point where micro enterprises can be viewed simply as an inspiring
narrative. In the South African context, they have become an economic necessity.” That distinction
matters.

We have become very good at turning entrepreneurship into motivational content. There is always a
smiling founder, an inspirational quote and a photograph taken beside a new piece of equipment.
What tends to disappear from the frame is how extraordinarily difficult it is to keep a tiny business
alive.

According to the Dickie’s experience, roughly half of the micro enterprises they encounter begin
because someone has spotted a genuine opportunity. The other half begin because someone needs
to eat. Those are very different starting lines. His estimate is that an opportunity-driven micro
enterprise might have around a 30% chance of surviving, while a necessity-driven one may be closer
to 10%. Only about 15% of the businesses they work with are genuinely positioned for growth. These
figures are practitioner estimates rather than national survival statistics, but they expose something
important about the way we talk about entrepreneurship.

We are obsessed with scale. Every entrepreneur is apparently supposed to become an employer,
then a founder, then a CEO, preferably with a LinkedIn announcement somewhere along the way.

Real life is less tidy. If someone who could not find work builds a business that reliably pays their
rent, buys groceries and keeps the lights on, that matters. If it eventually employs another person,
even better. But a one-person business that creates a sustainable livelihood has not somehow failed
because it did not become the next big thing.

As Dickie put it, “If a young person can create a sustainable livelihood for themselves, that has real
economic and social value.” In a country with our unemployment numbers, we should take that
sentence seriously.

There is another uncomfortable truth hiding beneath South Africa’s enthusiasm for
entrepreneurship sometimes the difference between an idea and an operating business is not a
multimillion-rand investment.

It is R5,000…Or R10,000 according to Dickie. Enough for initial stock, equipment, transport or the
first small production run. For many young entrepreneurs, even that relatively modest amount
remains difficult to access.

Yet money is only part of the story. The businesses that stall are often undone by decidedly
unglamorous things. The owner does not understand who is actually buying. Customers are not
followed up. Prices are set without knowing the margins. Business money becomes household
money because, inevitably, the household needs it. Then comes the first serious setback and
suddenly the business is fighting for oxygen.

“Capital can help a good business grow,” Dickie told me, “but capital cannot compensate for a lack of
business capability.”

That is a less exciting message than “fund the youth”, but probably a more useful one.

A young entrepreneur does not necessarily need another six months in a classroom. They may need
someone they can call when their biggest customer has not paid, when their pricing makes no sense,
when sales suddenly collapse or when they are deciding whether to spend their last R3,000 on stock
or marketing. That is where sustained business coaching becomes far more interesting than once-off
training.

Corporate South Africa also needs to reconsider what successful enterprise development looks like.
A programme should not be judged primarily by how many entrepreneurs entered it, how many
training hours were delivered or how many certificates were printed.

But where are those businesses three years later? Are they trading? Are their revenues improving?
Have they entered new markets? Are they employing anyone? Can the owner now support
themselves without returning to unemployment? Those answers tell us far more than an attendance
register ever will. And perhaps that requires a longer attention span. Building viable businesses takes
years, not the neat twelve-month cycle of a corporate budget.

So please, lets Stop calling it a side hustle. There is something revealing about this phrase. A side
hustle is supposed to sit beside something else. But beside what?

For millions of South Africans, there is no salaried job sitting on the other side of the equation. The
hustle is the income. The micro enterprise is the employment strategy. The person selling food,
repairing phones, braiding hair, coding websites, manufacturing furniture or running a township
delivery service is not waiting in the wings of the economy. They are already in it.

That does not mean South Africa should give up on creating formal jobs. Quite the opposite. We
desperately need investment, industrial growth and businesses capable of employing people at
scale.

But waiting for those jobs while treating micro enterprise as an interesting sideshow would be a
serious mistake. The future South African economy will not be built exclusively in boardrooms in
Sandton. Some of it is already being built at taxi ranks, on WhatsApp, in garages, back rooms,
kitchens, salons, workshops and township high streets. Stall by stall. Customer by customer. Invoice
by invoice.

The people building it do not need us to keep calling them inspirational. They need access to
markets. Faster payment. Sensible finance. Serious business support. Safer places to trade. And
enough time to turn survival into something sturdier.

Perhaps the most important shift is the simplest one. Stop treating micro enterprise as the waiting
room for the formal economy. Start treating it as fuel for the economy itself.