Abstract
Youth unemployment in South Africa has been a persistent issue that has rapidly morphed into a crisis, further exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. The potential role of social enterprises in addressing this challenge is an emerging research area that requires concerted and elaborate efforts. This study contributes to this area by exploring the social enterprise model as an underexplored approach to addressing the issue. The study draws from qualitative exploratory research with 8 social enterprises and examines how social enterprises are engaging with the challenge of youth unemployment in South Africa, and whether and how the social enterprise model assists in these efforts. The findings provide insights into the unique characteristics of the social enterprise model and how they enable owners to respond to youth unemployment in the country. The study is rooted in the contextual underpinnings of South Africa, highlighting the adaptive nature of social enterprises to their environments. Two dominant features of the social enterprise model emerge as important factors that position the model to be potentially responsive to youth unemployment in the country. These are the hybrid nature of the model, which offers enterprises the ability to organically transition between business models as they grow and respond to their social and market demands, and the pluralistic nature of the model, which allows social enterprises to forge key strategic partnerships that directly feed into their business and social motives. This research illuminates aspects of the social enterprise model that could offer more practical and grounded approaches to fully realizing national agendas that could potentially aid in addressing youth unemployment.
Keywords
Social enterprise, social impact, youth unemployment, pluralism, hybrid.