EDUCATION: Eastern Cape teacher assistants left without income after contract ends and funding hiatus

Eastern Cape residents Nkululeko Diba, Nobadula Zanele and Lilly Estelle Schutte are among 1.4 million young South Africans who have benefited – in the short term at least – from a huge youth employment project that has alleviated the daily stresses of teachers in about 23,000 schools since 2020. But now they are back home, and the project’s future is uncertain.

Nkululeko Diba wakes up every morning not knowing what to do with himself.

For six months last year the 32-year-old from eBhofolo had a purpose. He arrived at Thubalethu High School in KwaMaqoma, Fort Beaufort, to support English teaching. He earned R4,000 a month and, for the first time in years, had an answer when someone asked what he did.

“It’s very hard to wake up in the morning not knowing what to do with yourself because now I have no direction,” said Diba, who holds a health and safety certificate but has no matric. He had been unemployed for years before the Basic Education Employment Initiative (BEEI) gave him a job entry in June 2025. He has been applying for any type of work since his contract ended in November.

Diba is one of 28,709 young people deployed as education assistants in Eastern Cape public schools during Phase 5 of the BEEI – the government’s largest youth employment programme, which has placed about 1.4 million people in roughly 23,000 schools nationally since its launch in 2020, at a total cost of R31.3-billion according to a report by the Presidential Employment Stimulus (PES). Its sixth phase is on hold amid a funding gap and pending the outcome of a pitch to National Treasury.

According to the Eastern Cape Department of Education, it spent R574.18-million on stipends during Phase 5, deploying assistants across 4,754 public schools, with funding from the Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF), which provided R4-billion nationally after Treasury – which had backed the programme’s first four phases – stepped back.

When planners began designing Phase 6, the UIF declined to release further money until the completion of an independent audit of Phase 5. In the meantime, the 2026 national Budget dealt a sharper blow: the BEEI allocation was cut from R5.6-billion to R340-million – enough to cover administration only, with no funded posts for young people. Against a backdrop of record application numbers and mounting evidence of the programme’s classroom impact, the money has effectively run out.

PES programme lead, Dr Kate Philip, did not mince her words. “The future is uncertain,” she said. There is currently no firm fiscal allocation for the initiative – only a small amount set aside – leaving it in institutional limbo.

Part of the problem, Philip explained, lies in the architecture of the funding itself. Money from the UIF cannot flow directly to the Department of Basic Education (DBE) or to provinces. Instead, programme ownership sits with the Sector Education and Training Authority, which must coordinate plans with the DBE before anything can move – a layered, bureaucratic funding chain. Even if the political will exists, she made it clear that the money simply cannot be redirected in time for the current financial year.