The case for reform of public employment programmes (PEPs) has become increasingly urgent, as South Africa grapples with an ongoing unemployment crisis – alongside the need to address some scepticism about whether these programmes are delivering meaningful value for participants, society and the economy.
The purpose of reform of PEPs is to improve the outcomes and impacts from the public investments being made, for participants, for the society and for the economy. This paper focuses on a particular dimension of that agenda, related to the modalities of delivery of public employment programmes and the relative merits of approaches that “mainstream” public employment into the budgets of existing government programmes, where employment is an ancillary outcome, compared to more programmatic approaches to the design, rollout and scale-up of programmes which have public employment as their main purpose.