Bringing the labour market closer to people

For many years my work has circled a single, stubborn question: how do we help unemployed people find a way into the world of work? In South Africa, where unemployment is not an individual misfortune but a structural feature of everyday life, that question carries a particular weight.

In one of our research projects we tried to do something practical about it. We adapted the JOBS programme — an evidence-based intervention originally developed to prepare unemployed people for employment — for the South African context, and studied what it could achieve. The results were encouraging in the ways such programmes tend to be: participants grew in confidence, in job-search skills, in their sense of themselves as people who had something to offer.

And then one participant asked a question that has stayed with me ever since.

“I am thankful for the course,” she said, “but what now? There is still no work. Is it then worthwhile to participate in such a training programme?”

It was not an ungrateful question. It was an honest one, and it went straight to the limit of what an intervention like ours could do. We had prepared a person for a labour market — but the labour market had not moved an inch to meet her.

A picture worth keeping

I found myself turning the question over with a close friend, Prof. Roland Blonk, who has spent much of his life thinking about how to create opportunities for excluded people to be integrated into the labour market. Roland used to draw a simple picture to make his point. Preparing unemployed people, he would say, is about bringing the individual closer to the labour market. But that is only half of the drawing. The other half is about bringing the labour market closer to people.

If we only ever work on one side of that picture, we place the entire burden of change on the person who has the least power to change the system. Yes, it is necessary to prepare unemployed people to find jobs. But it matters just as much what employers think and do. Do employers also need to be prepared — to think and act inclusively? And what barriers within a country make it difficult, even for willing employers, to create work opportunities for the people who most need them?

Those questions redrew the map of our research. They moved our attention from the supply side of the labour market — the job-seeker — to the demand side, and to the conditions that shape it.

Turning the questions into research

To pursue this properly, we recruited a master’s student, Kelebogile (Kele) Ramagaga. Kele is undertaking a scoping review of the literature on inclusive employment, and conducting a qualitative study to understand employers’ attitudes, needs and capabilities when it comes to employing people who face barriers to work. If employers are as central as Roland’s picture suggests, then we need to understand their world — not to judge it, but to work with it.

In August 2026, Kele and I met with Dr Johan Landsberg of North-West University and Prof. Danie Meyer, a development economist at the University of Johannesburg, to help us identify employers who might be approached to take part in the study. It was one of those conversations that does more than solve a logistical problem; it reframes how you see your own work.

What do we mean by “inclusive employment”?

Before going further, it helps to be precise about the central idea. For the purposes of this project, we work with the following definition:

Inclusive employment refers to the creation of, and equitable access to, decent and sustainable employment opportunities — particularly for people who are unemployed or who experience barriers to labour-market participation. It involves organisational practices and employment conditions that enable people to enter employment, to participate and contribute meaningfully, to use and develop their capabilities, to receive fair treatment and remuneration, and to sustain and progress in employment over time.

Two things are worth noticing about this definition. First, it is deliberately broad about who is included: not only people with disabilities, with whom the language of inclusion is often associated, but anyone who faces meaningful barriers to entering or staying in work. Second, it treats employment as more than a moment of “getting a job.” It draws on the tradition of decent work and on a capability perspective: inclusion is not achieved at the point of hiring but sustained across entry, meaningful participation, fair reward, and progression over time. On this view, inclusion is as much about what happens after the appointment as before it — and it locates a large share of the responsibility with organisations and employers, not with job-seekers alone. This is Roland’s picture, translated into a working concept.

From inclusive employment to inclusive growth

This is where the conversation with Prof. Meyer opened up a wider horizon.

Much of Prof. Meyer’s work as a development economist concerns inclusive growth — and, more broadly, what he and others describe as South Africa’s “triple challenge” of poverty, unemployment and inequality. A recurring theme in this literature is that economic growth, on its own, is not enough. Where inequality is high, the gains from growth can be captured narrowly and leave the excluded no better off. For growth to be inclusive, it has to be broad-based and participatory: people must be able to take part in the economy and share in what it produces.

Inclusive growth, measured — and why employment sits at its centre

Prof. Meyer’s contribution is not only conceptual but measurable. In his Alternative Inclusive Growth Index — and the more recent Local Government Inclusive Growth Index adapted for South African municipalities — inclusive growth is captured across eight dimensions: employment, economic growth, poverty, income equality, infrastructure, education, health, and dependency. Underlying the index is a working definition of inclusive growth as growth in which people can access, participate in, and benefit from development, with a distinctly South African emphasis on reducing poverty and inequality, expanding employment, and improving access to education, healthcare and basic services.

What stands out for our purposes is how the dimensions are weighted. Employment carries the largest weight of all — 25%, ahead of economic growth and poverty (15% each), equality, infrastructure, education and health (10% each), and dependency (5%). Meyer therefore does not treat employment as merely one social outcome among many; it is the single most heavily weighted component of inclusive growth. For a country with South Africa’s unemployment levels, that weighting is telling: it says that whether growth is inclusive depends more on jobs than on any other single factor.

The eight dimensions also group naturally into four broader domains — economic participation (employment, economic growth), distribution of benefits (poverty reduction, income equality), enabling conditions (infrastructure, education, health), and demographic sustainability (dependency). Read this way, employment is the primary channel of economic participation: the mechanism through which macro-level growth becomes shared prosperity in individual lives.

Where inclusive growth meets inclusive employment

Placing our two vocabularies side by side, the connection becomes clear. Inclusive growth is the macro-level story; inclusive employment is where that story becomes real in individual lives and workplaces. If employment is the heaviest lever of inclusion at the level of the economy, our work asks how that lever is actually pulled — inside firms. A growth path that does not generate accessible, decent, sustainable work will do little to move the triple challenge. And whether such work is generated comes down to decisions made inside organisations: who gets hired, on what terms, with what chance to develop and progress. These are the fine-grained mechanisms that determine whether growth is shared or hoarded.

Seen this way, the employer sits precisely at the hinge between the two. Employers are the actors who convert economic activity into opportunities for real people — which makes their attitudes, needs and capabilities not a peripheral concern but a central lever of inclusive growth itself. Preparing unemployed people to find work, and preparing the labour market to receive them, are two halves of the same developmental project.

Coming back to the question

Which brings me back to the participant who asked whether her course had been worthwhile when there was still no work at the end of it.

I think the honest answer is that her preparation was necessary but not sufficient — and that the “not sufficient” part is not her failing but ours, collectively, to solve. Her question is, in the end, the reason this next phase of research exists. We are no longer only asking how to bring people closer to the labour market. We are asking how to bring the labour market closer to them: how employers think, what they need, what they are able to do, and what barriers stand in the way of the inclusive, growth-generating work that so many people are ready and waiting to do.

That is the picture Roland used to draw. We are now trying to fill in the other half of it.

We are grateful to Prof. Danie Meyer for his valuable contributions on inclusive growth, and to Dr Johan Landsberg for his kind support along the way.