Youth unemployment is a tragic reality that has dug its claws deep into South Africa. Straight after matric, youth struggle with numerous challenges and the eminent one is unemployment. Whether choosing to take a gap year, further studies or jump straight into the job market, everyone still struggles with finding secure employment opportunities in South Africa. In fact, “the expanded unemployment rate for 20 – 24-year-olds is 61%, going down to 42% for 25 – 29-year-olds and 33% for 30 – 34-year-olds” (Graham and Mlatsheni 2015). These are concerning figures and the fact that youth unemployment continues to exponentially rise is alarming. This begs the question, what can the youth do to generate an income and economically empower themselves?

The list below is designed to show you that there are ways to combat the youth unemployment and generate some income on the side.

Teach English Online

Teaching English Online is an interesting and fun way to make money. There are numerous websites that do not require a teaching qualification for you to teach English. Luckily, South Africa is internationally recognized as a country with native English speakers, which opens up a window of opportunities to earn from international countries. Examples of websites that hire native speakers to teach English without a qualification are italki, preply and cambly. If you did well in your school subjects, you can also teach other subjects. You can teach Maths, Business Studies, Life Sciences or any subject you did well in in your neighborhood/school for a few extra bucks. You can also sign up to teach subjects on websites like TurtleJar, TeachMe2 and BrightlySparkz.

Start Your Own Business

One of the best ways to make money is to start a business doing something you love that your community and customers need. Assess what your community needs and offer that good or service. For instance, you could start selling baked goods, offering beauty services, writing CVs or even helping matriculants with university applications. Starting your own business can be daunting but it is completely achievable. Do more research in the niche you are interested in and get started. Another trick to launching your business is to understand how to market your business and google has a free marketing course that comes with a certificate for this. The course will teach you the ins and outs of social media, niches and search engine optimization. Placing posters and word of mouth are also great ways to advertise locally. The big question, however, becomes how to fund your business from the ground up, the third item on this list has got you covered.

Use Skills You Already Have

Using skills you already have is a smart way to start making money, and this income stream can be used to fund your other business interests or to develop as a larger business in itself. How do you know what you are good at? The best way to find out would be to ask your family and friends. You could be good at writing, mowing the lawn, transcribing or even writing school notes. Websites such as Livingston Research are a perfect way to make money writing essays, Stuvia and Studypool are best for selling school notes you wrote yourself, Rev.com and TrascribeMe are for transcribing. Most of these websites require that you have a stable internet connection and laptop. 

What about if you do not have these? You can offer services with a low start-up cost in your neighborhood or neighboring area, such as walking people’s dogs, washing your neighbors windows, using easy-mix boxes to make and sell muffins, reselling snacks, selling chips and drinks, the list is endless. Another service you can offer is braiding people’s hair, you would be surprised how many people are looking for a hairdresser and if you already have the skill, it’s a great way to start making money. 

But what should you do if you do not have a skill that you can make money off?

Learn A New Skill

Learning a new skill does need a little bit of funding but it will definitely be worth it. There are numerous workshops being hosted by different people on different skills. However, your best friend today should be Youtube. There is a lot of value to attending workshops but there is also a lot to be learned from Youtube. If the skill you want to learn is available on Youtube, definitely learn from there. Next, navigate to Facebook groups that focus on that skill. For example, search “Nail Tech Beginners Tips” or “Baking For Beginners” or “Coding Beginners” or “Coding with Python”. Use your skill’s keywords to find Facebook groups and pages for beginners. Although many argue that the app is outdated, and go as far as to call it a village, Facebook has a lot of resources and a lot of people share insightful information there. 

Content Creation

When one speaks about content creation, a lot of people often think about becoming an influencer or having to have a lot of money, which is not the case. Content creation is very broad and falls into three main categories: Entertainment, Education and Inspiration. You can choose to entertain people through comedy skits, dance routines, vlogging and so on, you can also choose educational content where you teach what you know about a certain subject, this includes teaching academic content, how to cook or bake, how to invest, how to save money, how to study, how to color coordinate outfits, how to write better essays, anything you feel you know well enough to teach. You can also create inspirational content where you would either share snippets of your life in the hopes that those who relate can be inspired or create motivational videos using Pinterest, Canva and Capcut which are all free to use.

One of the best apps for content creation that is monetized is Youtube, and although it takes time to be monetized, it will be worth it. Another way to earn money from content creation is to work with brands. Build your online presence and then approach brands, not all of them will be keen to work with you but those that do will be offering you an opportunity to grow your platform while getting paid for it. Also follow other content creators to have a better understanding of the type of content brands expect in your niche market. Apps and websites that are useful for working with brands are Humanz, Rubybox and Brand Advisor. Directly emailing brands also works well, put together a detailed pitch for them using Canva and send them an enticing email where you sell your skills and what you can do for the brand.

This was written as part of the Fundza Fellowship Programme.