How South Africa Works ─ And Must Do Better

The overwhelming challenge that South Africa faces, and has to date failed to address, is unemployment, which falls especially on African youths who were promised a better future after 1994. If the current unemployment challenge is not addressed, it will be impossible to sustainably lift many millions of people out of poverty.
How South Africa Works reviews the country's major economic achievements over the past two decades. Through numerous interviews with politicians, business leaders and analysts, it examines the challenges and opportunities across key productive sectors -- including agriculture, manufacturing, services, and mining -- illustrative of the policy challenges that leaders face. It scrutinises the social grant and education systems to understand if South Africa has established mechanisms for people not only to escape destitution but be ready to be employed, and identifies steps that some of South Africa's most notable entrepreneurs have taken to build world-class enterprises. Recognizing the essential challenge to cultivate more employers to employ people, How South Africa Works concludes by offering an agenda and active steps for greater competitiveness for government, business and labor.

Jeffrey Herbst is the 16th President of Colgate University and has written extensively on political and international affairs. His primary research interests are in the politics of sub- Saharan Africa, the politics of political and economic reform and the politics of boundaries. Greg Mills is director of the Johannesburg-based Brenthurst Foundation. He is widely published on international affairs, development and security, an adviser to African governments, and the author of the best-selling books Why Africa is Poor: And What Africans Can Do About It (2010) and Why States Recover: Changing Walking Societies into Winning Nations, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe (2014).