Can better transport put more women to work?

For thousands of young South Africans, unemployment is not only about finding work. CHARLEEN CLARKE writes that transport costs and safety can determine whether they can even reach an interview in the first place…

South Africa’s unemployment crisis is usually discussed in terms of economic growth, skills and job creation. Yet there is another barrier that receives far less attention: the cost and practicality of simply getting to work.

Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator’s August 2026 Breaking Barriers report puts transport firmly into that conversation. Its data shows that transport costs account for roughly 20% of median earnings across all employment types. For someone earning at the lower end of the labour market, that is not a minor household expense, but rather a structural obstacle – and before a person can even earn a salary, they must often pay to search for work.

The cost of opportunity

Young jobseekers may need to travel repeatedly to interviews, assessments, training sessions or onboarding appointments before earning their first rand. For those living far from commercial centres, industrial areas or transport nodes, that journey can be expensive, unreliable and – particularly for women – unsafe.

The problem is especially severe because South Africa’s youth labour market remains under extraordinary pressure. The official unemployment rate rose to 33.6% in the second quarter of 2026, while the expanded youth unemployment rate reached 55.3%. Employment among 18 to 35-year-olds fell by another 40,000 individuals during the quarter.

For women, the picture is even tougher. Harambee reports that young women’s employment rates remain about 10 percentage points below those of young men. Looking at trends from the first quarter of 2008 to the first quarter of 2026, the number of employed young women fell by roughly 298,000, leaving broad unemployment among young women at around 60%. That makes every avoidable barrier to employment significant.

When the interview is too expensive

One of the report’s most revealing points of emphasis is remarkably simple: help people get to interviews.

Uber Rides for Jobs provides transport to interviews for young workseekers. Since June 2025, 790 vouchers have been distributed, enabling 1,421 trips and saving participants more than R184,000 in transport costs. According to Harambee, 32% of participants ultimately secured the role for which they interviewed. Almost three in four successful hires were women.

Those numbers make a powerful point. Sometimes the difference between unemployment and employment is not another training course, another CV-writing workshop or another recruitment campaign; sometimes it is simply a ride.

For the transport sector, that should make uncomfortable reading. Mobility exists to connect people with opportunity. When the cost, safety or availability of mobility prevents people from accessing work, transport is no longer merely reflecting inequality; it is reinforcing it.

Women feel the barriers first

Harambee describes women as “employment bellwethers” because their experience of the labour market can reveal wide-ranging problems. During the Covid-19 pandemic, for example, women accounted for roughly two-thirds of jobs lost and experienced a slower, more uneven recovery. The report argues that women often encounter more severe versions of barriers affecting excluded young people generally, including work-seeking costs, safety concerns, limited experience and educational disadvantage.

The appetite for work is certainly there. By 28 July 2026, Phase V of the National Youth Service had attracted more than 1.23 million applications, with women accounting for about 79%. That challenges the damaging assumption that people remain unemployed because they are unwilling to work.

The data points instead to a far more complicated reality: many desperately want work, but the system around employment can make accessing that work extraordinarily difficult.

This is a transport industry problem

The findings should resonate particularly strongly with transport, logistics and supply chain employers.

Many jobs in our industry are located at depots, warehouses, distribution centres, ports and industrial parks, rather than conveniently situated office blocks. Operations also frequently run outside conventional working hours.

That creates an obvious challenge. An employer may find the perfect candidate yet still lose that person because the first shift starts before public transport does or the last shift ends after available services have stopped. The commute may swallow an unsustainable portion of an entry-level wage, or the journey may simply feel too dangerous.

This doesn’t mean that every employer must suddenly provide door-to-door transport, but it does suggest that access to the workplace must become part of workforce planning. Transport and logistics companies obsess over productivity, fleet utilisation, turnaround times and supply chain efficiency. It makes little sense to optimise every movement of a pallet while ignoring whether employees can reliably reach the facility where that pallet is handled.

Design for the people facing the biggest barriers

One of the most useful concepts in the Harambee report is the “curb cut effect”. A curb cut may be designed to help a wheelchair user negotiate a pavement. Yet it also helps parents pushing prams, elderly people using walkers, travellers pulling luggage and delivery workers moving goods.

The same principle can be applied to employment and transport. A safer transport option introduced to enable women to work late shifts can benefit every employee. More reliable staff transport can reduce disruption caused by workers struggling to reach the workplace. Better lighting around workplaces and transport interchanges can improve personal safety as well as road visibility.

Introducing flexible scheduling to counter transport or caregiving constraints may similarly benefit employees facing entirely different challenges. In other words, designing for those who encounter the greatest barriers can make the whole system work better.

Inclusion can make business sense

The report also challenges the idea that inclusion is necessarily an extra business cost. South Africa’s Global Business Services sector has created 153,574 jobs since 2018, with 90% of these going to young people and 64% to women. Harambee reports that impact-sourced employees recorded monthly attrition of just 2.1%, compared with 7% among other hires, while being 42% more cost-effective and achieving comparable or stronger productivity outcomes.

The transport and logistics industry is not the Global Business Services sector, and those numbers cannot simply be transferred from one industry to another. Nevertheless, the broader lesson deserves attention: removing barriers can strengthen a labour pool rather than undermine commercial performance. That is particularly relevant to an industry constantly discussing skills shortages, transformation and the need to attract a new generation of employees.

Beyond Women’s Month

There is a danger every August that women’s advancement becomes a month of speeches, photographs and inspirational quotations, only for the structural problems to remain unchanged in September. The Harambee report gives Women’s Month a far more practical challenge.

If women are struggling to enter or stay in employment because transport is unaffordable, unsafe or unavailable when they need it, then mobility must form part of the employment solution. Government has a role; public transport operators have a role; employers have a role; as do industry bodies and employment organisations. The issue is ultimately bigger than women, precisely because addressing the barriers confronting women can improve access for many others.

South Africa desperately needs more people in productive employment. With expanded youth unemployment sitting at 55.3%, we can hardly afford to lose willing, capable candidates because the journey between home and opportunity simply does not work. A job offer is only valuable if the person receiving it can get there. For a country, an economy and an industry built on movement, that may be one of the most important transport challenges of all.