Article provided by the IITPSA Women in IT (WIIT) Committee
This Youth Day marks the Golden Jubilee of the 1976 uprising, under the national theme “RESET@50 – The Future Calls”. For the IITPSA Women in IT Chapter, the call is specific: audit the barriers to digital access and remove them.
On the morning of 16 June 1976, thousands of schoolchildren walked out of their classrooms in Soweto to protest being taught in a language designed to limit them. Fifty years later, to the day, South Africa marks Youth Day in a country where 60.9% of young people aged 15 to 24 cannot find work, and where the language of opportunity has changed again. It is no longer Afrikaans or English. It is digital: code, data, connectivity and, increasingly, AI. Once again, too many young South Africans are locked out of the classroom where it is taught.
A Reset, Fifty Years in the Making
The 2026 commemoration carries a theme that speaks directly to technologists: “RESET@50 – The Future Calls”, under the slogan “Our National Commitment to the Future, for Freedom Lives in Every Generation”. June’s focus sharpens this into an instruction: “Mapping the Barriers: Auditing Access for Economic Inclusion”.
In technology, a reset is not nostalgia. It is the deliberate act of restoring a system to a state in which it can function. That is exactly what this anniversary demands because the system, as it stands, is failing its youngest users.
Statistics South Africa’s Youth and the Labour Market in Q1 2026 report records unemployment at 60.9% among young people aged 15 to 24 and 40.6% among those aged 25 to 34. Some 3.9 million young people aged 15 to 24, more than a third of an entire generation, are not in employment, education or training (NEET). Young women carry the heavier share: the female NEET rate has been above the male rate for years, and in 2026 the gap widened to 3.2 percentage points. While young men are moving towards the labour market, young women are moving further from it.
These are not just labour market statistics. They are the access audit that the nation has requested, and it is failing.
A Classroom in Her Pocket
Walk through Soweto, Khayelitsha or Mthatha today, and the most powerful educational institution in sight is not a building. It is a phone.
For a young woman with a smartphone and data, that device is a classroom, a business tool and a gateway to global networks. She can learn to code on a free platform. She can use an AI tutor as a study partner, explaining a difficult concept at midnight when no teacher is available. She can sell to customers three provinces away, freelance for a client on another continent, and find a bursary in a WhatsApp group before it ever reaches a noticeboard.
None of this replaces formal education. It does something the marchers of 1976 would have recognised instantly: it puts the means of learning within reach of those underserved by the formal system.
Mapping the Barriers
But within reach is not the same as within grasp. Run the audit; the national focus demands it, and the result is stark.
Stats SA’s 2025 General Household Survey found that 85.6% of households now have internet access, overwhelmingly via mobile phones. Yet only one in five (20.6%) has fixed internet access at home. The gap between those figures is where opportunity dies, in prepaid data that runs out before the lesson does, in one shared device in a household of six, and in connectivity that thins as you travel from Sandton to the rural Eastern Cape.
The door to the digital economy stands open. The toll gate in front of it does not. A free online course is not free if the data required to stream it exceeds the household’s monthly airtime budget. An AI tutor cannot help a learner it cannot reach. And every barrier the audit maps, including cost, devices, connectivity, and digital literacy, falls hardest on the same young people the labour market already excludes. Young women are first among them.
“The generation of 1976 fought a state that decided which knowledge they could access. This generation faces a market that prices access beyond their reach. Different gatekeeper. Same gate.”
This is the unfinished business of Soweto. The struggle then was over the language of the classroom. The struggle now is over the language of the economy, and fluency is being rationed by the price of a gigabyte.
What the Next Fifty Years Require
If “Mapping the Barriers” is June’s assignment, removing them will be the work of the next fifty years, and it will not be achieved by commemoration.
It requires affordable connectivity to be treated as economic infrastructure rather than a luxury good. It requires digital literacy to be taught as deliberately as reading: the ability to evaluate information, protect privacy, and use AI tools critically, not merely to consume them. It requires the responsible adoption of AI in ways that close the gaps in under-resourced classrooms rather than widening them. And it requires institutions, government, industry, and professional bodies like ours to translate Youth Month language into year-round delivery.
The IITPSA Women in IT Chapter holds this as a mandate, not a sentiment. Digital inclusion, skills development and responsible AI adoption are the conditions under which South Africa’s young people, particularly young women, can participate in the digital economy rather than watch it from the outside.
This Youth Day, One Step
The learners who marched in 1976 did not wait for permission to demand a different future. Fifty years on, that is the inheritance worth claiming, not commemoration but action.
So, take one step. If you are a young person, choose one digital skill, such as coding, data analytics, design, or AI fluency, and begin this week, before Youth Month ends, by using online learning platforms and technology skilling programmes that cost nothing but data: FreeCodeCamp or Khan Academy for coding and fundamentals; ALX Africa for structured tech programmes for African youth; or Google Digital Skills for Africa for marketing and analytics. Alternatively, apply to WeThinkCode, South Africa’s tuition-free coding academy.
If you are established in this industry, commit to mentoring one young person this year. If you are a young woman ready to build a career in technology, come to us. The WIIT mentorship programme opens soon. Our bursary programme supports young women entering ICT studies, and our chapter community is open year-round at womeninit.org.za.
A reset only works if someone initiates it. The future is calling in a digital language. Every young South African deserves to answer it fluently.