Education, Employability and Imagining the Future: A Minor Field Study of Goals and Motivations in a South African Small-Scale Development Programme

Abstract: South Africa is one of the most unequal countries in the world, and that shows in the distribution of opportunities amongst South Africans. In the face of political failures to deliver improvements for unemployed youth NGO projects become more important avenues for young people to acquire resources needed to improve their lives. This essay aims to centre the perspectives of the unemployed youth that make use of such projects by examining their motivations for participation and the way their participation can be understood in relation to their futures. The overarching aim is to contribute meaningfully to the understanding of how the individual youths who participate in the programme negotiate the structural inequalities in South African society. The analysis is built on qualitative data collected through interviews during 8 weeks of fieldwork in Diepsloot, South Africa during the spring of 2023 and analysed using a Bourdieusian framework. We found that the motivations for participation were largely related to employability, and that the programme was seen to fulfil several different purposes, such as compensating for a lack of economic, cultural, and/or symbolic capital. The lack of capital was concluded to be connected to the ways the tutors can imagine their futures. In this way material and immaterial circumstances affected not only what was possible, but what was imagined as possible.