South Africa’s Expanded Public Works Programme has spent years fending off a familiar accusation: that its opportunities go first to the politically connected rather than the genuinely unemployed. This week, the Chairperson of the Select Committee on Public Infrastructure, Rikus Badenhorst, welcomed a reform he says finally answers that criticism with a system rather than a slogan — moving EPWP recruitment onto the SA Youth Mobi digital platform, a decision taken by Public Works and Infrastructure Minister Dean Macpherson.
The shift matters because of what it removes as much as what it adds. Badenhorst said the allegations of gatekeeping, patronage and abuse that have dogged the EPWP for years were heard directly during the Minister’s nationwide listening tours, and that the response could not be another policy document — it had to change how the programme actually works. Digitising recruitment does that by making opportunities visible and applying rules-based matching on criteria such as location, education and eligibility, narrowing the space in which a politically connected intermediary can decide who gets an opportunity and who does not. The platform is also zero-rated, meaning applicants need neither airtime nor data to use it — a detail that speaks directly to South Africa’s youth unemployment crisis, where the cost of simply searching for work is itself a barrier for millions.
That crisis is the backdrop against which this South Africa EPWP reform has to be judged. Statistics South Africa’s latest Quarterly Labour Force Survey put the country’s official unemployment rate at 33.6 percent in the second quarter of 2026, up nearly a full percentage point from the previous quarter. Among South Africans aged 15 to 34, the picture is starker still: the youth unemployment rate climbed to 47.4 percent, with the total number of unemployed young people rising by 264,000 to reach 5 million. Those figures, confirmed in the same release, underline why a public employment programme reaching hundreds of thousands of participants a year carries political weight far beyond its budget line — and why its credibility problem has been treated as more than an administrative footnote.
This South Africa EPWP reform did not begin with the SA Youth Mobi rollout. It builds on a broader initiative, Working on Infrastructure, which Macpherson launched in Durban in May 2026 as a direct response to the EPWP listening tours, where officials heard accounts ranging from cautious hope to open despair about how opportunities were being allocated. The department has described the pattern bluntly: informal recruitment — sometimes little more than a name written on a scrap of paper handed to a ward councillor — created conditions for abuse, including reports of bribery and intimidation tied to political affiliation. Under the new protocols, ward councillors no longer serve as the primary point of contact for registering applicants, a change designed specifically to close that door.
The more consequential piece of the reform, in Badenhorst’s reading, is not the recruitment technology itself but what Working on Infrastructure tries to do with the people it recruits. The EPWP has long been criticised as a revolving door: short-term placements that leave participants no more employable when they exit than when they entered. Working on Infrastructure is built around longer-duration participation, hands-on infrastructure repair and maintenance experience, structured mentorship, accredited training and certification, and pathways toward recognised occupational roles and, eventually, permanent employment. The pilot brings together TVET colleges, municipalities, provincial departments, SMMEs and industry partners to provide that combination of technical training and workplace exposure, an approach the department frames as moving public employment from short-term relief toward a genuine pathway into the labour market.
For African governments watching from outside South Africa’s borders, the stakes of this experiment extend well past one country’s job scheme. Public works programmes are among the most common tools African states use to respond to youth unemployment, and nearly all of them face the same structural risk: political capture at the point of recruitment. If South Africa can demonstrate that digitising entry into a public employment programme measurably reduces gatekeeping — and, more importantly, that it produces participants who go on to find sustainable work — that model has clear relevance for public works schemes across the continent, from Ghana’s youth employment initiatives to Kenya’s national infrastructure programmes. It also speaks to a wider continental conversation about how digital public infrastructure, of the kind Afrikeye covers regularly under its Politics desk, can be used to strengthen accountability rather than merely digitise existing dysfunction.
Badenhorst was careful not to treat the reform as self-evidently successful. He said South Africa does not need government programmes that simply improve participation statistics; it needs programmes that improve people’s prospects, and that parliamentary oversight will now track implementation, accessibility and whether the promised pathways actually translate into sustainable employment. That caution is warranted. EPWP reforms have been announced before without fully displacing the informal networks that shaped access on the ground, and a zero-rated app removes one point of friction without guaranteeing that certified training leads to real jobs in an economy still shedding formal employment, as the latest labour force data shows. Whether Working on Infrastructure escapes that pattern will depend less on the platform than on what happens after a young person completes it — and that is precisely what the Select Committee says it intends to measure. Travellers and businesses tracking South Africa’s public infrastructure investment pipeline, including through Afrikeye’s travel coverage, will also be watching whether the maintenance and repair work channelled through the programme translates into visible improvements on the ground.
What comes next is a test of follow-through rather than design. The Committee’s oversight role means the coming months should produce the first hard data on how many EPWP participants move from the digital platform into completed training, workplace placement and, ultimately, employment beyond the programme — the metric Badenhorst says will determine whether this counts as reform or simply relaunch. For a country where youth unemployment now touches nearly half the working-age population under 35, that data will matter well beyond the Department of Public Works.
