SA has a cut-off problem. And we do not talk about it enough.
If you are between 19 and 34, the system sees you.
Bursaries. Government funding opportunities. Youth development programmes. Business start-up support.
There are structures, however imperfect, that acknowledge your existence and your need.
The day you turn 35, much of that disappears.
No more youth bursary eligibility.
No more government-funded business development support targeted at you.
No more youth employment programmes.
As far as many of our systems are concerned, you have aged out of needing help.
But here is the reality those systems are not accounting for.
SA’s unemployment rate just hit 32.7%.
We have 8.1-million people without work.
Many of them are not 22 years old fresh from university.
Many of them are 35, 38, 42, people who could not access tertiary education at 19 because they were working to support a family.
People who enrolled late because finances only became possible later.
People who simply could not get their foot in the door.
The system designed to support them has already closed its doors.
I know this personally.
There was a period in my own life when I considered changing direction entirely.
And when I looked at what support was available, I kept encountering the same cut-off. 35.
As if need expires. As if ambition has a shelf life.
I thought about the people sitting at home who had reached that age without a job, without a business, without a path, and who had just watched the last eligibility window close.
Not because they stopped trying. Because the system stopped seeing them.
We continue to point to certain people who have aged quickly or drastically, and we never stop to look at the weight they carry.
The sustained psychological cost of being structurally forgotten does something to a person that no statistic fully captures.
A system that stops investing in people at 35 is not a system that believes in human potential.
It is a system that believes in human utility.
And when the utility window closes, so does the support.
We need to redesign the eligibility framework.
Support structures must follow the actual life trajectories of South Africans, not the linear, uninterrupted trajectory the system was designed around, but the real ones.
The interrupted ones. Shaped by poverty, responsibility, circumstance and late starts.
Because a person at 38 who is still trying deserves to be seen.
I see you! We see you!
Lindithemba Sdeb, Eastcape Midlands TVET College assistant director partnerships and linkages
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