STEVEN ZWANE | How businesses can unlock youth potential this Mandela month

Every July, South Africans ask what they can give for 67 minutes.

We donate food, paint schools, distribute books and care for vulnerable people. These acts matter. A meal is not symbolic for someone who is hungry. Service reminds us we belong to one another.

However, this Mandela Month we should ask a more demanding question: Whose future can I help to open?

South Africa’s greatest crisis is not that young people lack ambition, intelligence or creativity. It is that too many are standing outside closed doors, the first job, because they lack experience; business, because they lack customers, capital and networks; higher education, because opportunity remains tied to geography and family income; and markets, because nobody will make them a first supplier.

They do not always need to be rescued. They need a fair opportunity to participate.

The call to make every day a Mandela Day reminds us that 67 minutes should mark the beginning of sustained action against poverty and inequality, not the end of our annual obligation. That requires moving beyond giving to granting access.

During a recent executive learning immersion in Singapore, I was struck by one national conviction: people and enterprises must be deliberately prepared to participate in the economy. Singapore’s realities differ sharply from ours.

But the principle holds: competitiveness is built through education, skills, technology, enterprise development and functioning public systems. More than 95% of Singapore’s small and medium-sized enterprises now use at least one digital technology.

The lesson is plain: small businesses should not be left to struggle alone. They should be helped to become productive, innovative and connected to markets.

A nation reveals what it values through what it prepares its people to become.

Nelson Mandela did not see young people merely as recipients of generosity. He saw them as leaders, builders and custodians of the future. Yet we often commemorate him by doing things for young people while leaving them outside the rooms where decisions and opportunities are made.

We invite them to motivational talks, but not into boardrooms. We train them, but do not buy from their businesses. We celebrate entrepreneurship, but make it nearly impossible to secure a first customer. We tell young people to create jobs while withholding access to markets, technology and working capital.

Through Youth Leadership and Entrepreneurship Development, I have watched grade 11 pupils who had never entered a boardroom stand before business leaders and defend their ideas. Once given access, they did not ask for sympathy. They asked for honest feedback, customers and another chance to improve.

That experience taught me something important: the distance between potential and progress is rarely about talent.

It is about access.

This Mandela Day, every South African, and every institution, should open one door.

A professional can offer meaningful work exposure. A university can bring pupils onto a campus they have only seen from the outside. An established entrepreneur can introduce an emerging business owner to their first real customer. A company can give a youth-owned or township business its first credible commercial opportunity.

The true test of a company’s Mandela Day commitment is not how many employees volunteered for 67 minutes. It is how many young people and small businesses gained access to its workplace, supply chain, expertise or networks.

This is not an argument against charity. It is an argument for connecting compassion to capability.

Give the food parcel, but help build the local enterprise that can supply the next one. Donate the book, but create a reading circle that continues after July. Deliver the motivational talk, but arrange the internship or the customer meeting.

A young person does not always need someone to carry them. Sometimes they just need someone to say, “Come inside. Let me show you how this works.”

This matters especially in township and rural communities, where talent is abundant but access remains uneven.

Our young people need entrepreneurship education before unemployment forces them into business. They need room to experiment, learn and begin again. They need institutions that see small businesses not as beneficiaries at the edge of the economy, but as potential employers, innovators and partners at its centre.

Youth development and small business development are not social projects separate from the economy. They are how an economy builds its future.

Imagine if every major company used Mandela Month to identify one promising youth-owned enterprise and support it for a year. Not merely with a donation, but with a customer.

Not only with training but also with market access. Not simply with advice, but with a commercial opportunity.

Imagine if every school partnered with local businesspeople so pupils encountered entrepreneurship not as a desperate response to unemployment, but as a credible career pathway.

That would be a Mandela Day worthy of the future Madiba imagined.

We should continue feeding people, donating books and caring for our communities. Compassion remains essential. But we must move from temporary relief to lasting possibility.

A food parcel can carry a family through a difficult week. A book can introduce a young person to another world. But an opened door, a first job, a first customer, a mentor, or an opportunity can change the direction of a life.

This Mandela Day, do your 67 minutes.

Then do something that remains after those minutes have ended. Open one door.

And when a young person walks through it, do not walk in front of them. Walk alongside them.