South Africa has one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the world. With two thirds of young people excluded from employment, turning jobless youth into self-made entrepreneurs has become the mantra of the state, NGOs and the Church. In June 2015, at a government-funded ‘career exhibition’ targeting unemployed youth in Zandspruit informal settlement in Johannesburg, the leader of a youth-run NGO told the young people gathered not to wait for jobs but to start their own businesses. “Your future is in your hands, not government's hands,” Sibongile shouted, valorizing individual entrepreneurship as the solution to the crisis of youth unemployment.

During my time in Zandspruit, I found that many young people promoted the idea and aspiration of starting their own business. One young man by the name of Itumeleng wrote a self-help book called Be the Boss of your Future. In the introduction he writes: ‘A bit of shocking South African statistics. Only one out of every nine matriculants (14%) will get formal, salaried jobs. Only 9% will undergo tertiary education. As many as 80% will remain officially unemployed. To survive in such a harsh environment you need to start your own business’ (Dithupe, 2016, 32). Echoing the entrepreneurial messages from the state, Itumeleng presents self-employment as the solution to unemployment but also as a way to obtain economic independence and social mobility. The framing of entrepreneurship in the ‘township economy’ (or informal entrepreneurship) as a route to improved life chances rather than a ‘coping strategy’ (Rakodi, 1995) reflects important shifts in the ways in which researchers and policy makers conceptualize the informal economy. At the time of the career exhibition in Zandspruit, there was much talk about the Gauteng provincial government's Township Economy Revitalisation Strategy, which frames the ‘township economy’ as a generator of jobs, entrepreneurship and economic inclusion, rather than poverty and marginalization. This shift reflects the emergence of a new development paradigm that views the informal economy through the neoliberal lens of entrepreneurship and job creation (Roy, 2010; Dolan and Rajak, 2016; 2018).