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29 July 2026
Demand-led. Data-driven. Designed to last. This is what youth employment looks like when the built environment works like where the built environment works—not just launched to look good.
We've sat in enough rooms to know the script. A launch event, a glossy target, a photo with a minister. Then, quietly, a report nobody reads that explains why the number came in short. South Africa's youth have heard every version of this promise, and 62% of them, aged 15 to 24, are still unemployed.
We built Lulaway because we were tired of the gap between what gets announced and what gets delivered. So we made a decision early on: we would only ever talk about young people who are placed — not young people we intend to place. That distinction is the whole campaign. It's the whole company.
THE PROBLEM
At our inaugural Lula Talks convening in April 2026, we brought government, industry, academia and civil society into one room to stop diagnosing and start aligning. The conclusion that emerged, again and again, was uncomfortable: South Africa is not short on policy, strategy or ambition.
● Qualifications without jobs — Young people graduate from TVET and varsity into a vacuum. Training is disconnected from what employers actually need.
● Structural barriers — Transport,data costs, documentation gaps. The first job is the hardest one to get — not because of talent, but access.
● First-job dropout — Without mentorship, youth who do find work often leave within 90 days. The cycle repeats itself, cohort after cohort.
OUR INTENT
We don't train youth for jobs that don't exist. Every Lulaway pathway starts with employer demand, not training supply, we scan growing sectors, map the skills of the future, and reverse-engineer the journey from job to candidate. Industry-led. Data-informed. Human-centred.
1. Sector research — Industry-ledanalysis identifies demand sectors and the jobs of the future — last-mile delivery, BPO, AI entry-level roles, and the scarce skills flagged in the Skills Development Plan 2030.
2. Candidate sourcing — 1.3 million+ work-seekers on our database. We recruit, screen and match with precision, reaching NEET youth in the communities where the jobs are actually created.
3. Skills development — Targeted,SETA-accredited training through Lulaserve. Short cycles, practical outcomes —no training for training's sake.
4. Placement and activation — Youth go into live employment, micro-enterprise or internship, with full onboarding support. Income from day one — not a certificate and a goodbye.
5. Mentorship and retention — OurAI-powered mentorship tracks the first-job journey and overcomes early hurdles,giving funders real-time data at scale — not a once-a-year report.
This is why we say it's not a job to tick. It's a system to build, deliberately, sector by sector, one demand signal at a time.
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THE IMPACT
Over 15 years, that intent has moved more than 125,000 young South Africans into sustainable income. In our most recent chapter alone, two UIF projects and an additional funding portfolio, tracked in full in our 2026 Annual Impact Report, the model produced results funders can actually verify:
Figures from Lulaway's 2026 Annual Impact Report and 15-year enterprise track record. Full methodology and batch-level detail available in the downloadable reports below.
Behind those numbers are people who now run their own delivery fleets, who send their first pay slip photo to a parent, who didn't drop out at day 90 because someone checked in on day 30. That's the difference between a programme that launches and a pathway that lasts.
GO DEEPER
The full data — batch by batch, sector by sector, and the policy conversation shaping what comes next, is laid out in two reports. Both are free to download.
→ Download the 2026 Impact Report
→ Download the Lula Talks Insights Paper
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