We’ve all seen it: young graduates at traffic lights, clutching cardboard signs that read “Please hire me”.
It’s a heartbreaking picture of South Africa’s reality.
Our unemployment crisis is a personal, daily, soul-crushing journey of millions of South Africans.
The latest data points to a frightening reality of increasing unemployment with 33/% of all South Africans currently looking for work being unemployed.
Among young people, it’s even worse, with over 45% of those under 34 can’t find work.
Behind every statistic is someone who studied, trained, hustled, and still ends up waiting and hoping.
That’s where Thabo Maibi steps in.
He is a PhD student who has seen the hopelessness up close and decided he couldn’t just watch from the sidelines.
He decided to build an app called Career Agent which is designed to take some of the pain out of job hunting.
Thabo describes job hunting as emotionally draining.
Spending hours scrolling through job boards, sending applications into the void, never hearing back. It wears people down. Some of his friends even slipped into depression because of it.
So he created Career Agent which is a digital tool that feels like a personal career coach.
It scans thousands of job postings across multiple sites, looking for opportunities that actually match your skills, qualifications, and profession.
It doesn’t end unemployment, but it removes the endless grind of searching and lets people focus their energy on applying for the right jobs, not wasting time on the wrong ones.
Building an app as a student wasn’t easy. He had almost no funding, limited time, and more reasons to quit than to continue. But what kept him going was the impact he knew it could have.
“People have responsibilities — they have kids, they need to survive, they need food. If we don’t try to help them now, it’s going to be harder in the future, because so many jobs are being taken over by AI,” he says.
For Thabo, the app goes beyond connecting people with vacancies. He has made it about giving unemployed people back their dignity, and the belief that their hard work and skills still matter.
Why this story matters to us
At The Debrief Network, we’re on a mission. South Africa’s problems are enormous, but so is the creativity and determination of its people. We believe in finding and telling the stories of ordinary people who are building extraordinary solutions.
Yes, unemployment is a crisis. But it’s also where innovators like Thabo are showing up. They are finding ways to use technology, community, and sheer willpower to push back against despair. By shining a light on them, we remind ourselves that solutions exist — and that South Africa’s story is not only one of failure, but of possibility.
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