GrowZA Joins ILO BRICS Knowledge Series as Expert Organisation

GrowZA has been selected to participate as an expert organisation in the International Labour Organization’s BRICS in the World of Work and South-South Cooperation Knowledge Series, a new initiative focused on strengthening knowledge exchange between BRICS countries and the wider Global South.

The series brings together governments, practitioners, institutions and experts around some of the most consequential questions shaping labour markets today: social protection, formalisation, skills, employability, digitalisation, artificial intelligence and the future of work.

For GrowZA, the invitation is significant because these questions sit directly inside the work we are already doing.

Much of the development sector still approaches unemployment as a skills supply problem. Train more people, improve employability, strengthen digital capability and connect candidates to opportunity. Those interventions remain necessary, but they are increasingly insufficient because the structure of work itself is changing.

The old assumption was relatively straightforward: training prepared a person for a recognisable job, inside a recognisable organisation, governed by a reasonably recognisable employment relationship.

That relationship is becoming less stable.

Work is now routinely fragmented across platforms, intermediaries, contractors, temporary arrangements and distributed systems of accountability. A person may be economically active while having little income predictability, limited progression, no meaningful bargaining power and weak access to traditional labour protections.

This matters particularly in South Africa and across the Global South, where high unemployment, informality, platform work, outsourcing and large-scale skills programmes are developing alongside one another.

It creates a difficult policy question. We can report impressive training numbers and growing participation in the digital economy while still producing fragile livelihoods.

That gap between economic participation and economic security is becoming one of the defining labour questions of this period.

It is also where GrowZA intends to contribute.

Our interest is not simply whether more people can be trained for the future economy, but whether the architecture of that economy is capable of producing dignified, durable and meaningful work.

That requires a more serious interrogation of what sits behind conventional employment indicators. A young person completing a digital programme and accessing irregular platform work may simultaneously be counted as a training success, an employment outcome and a digital inclusion success. Yet those categories tell us very little about the quality of the work, whether income is stable, whether progression exists, who carries the risk, or whether the individual has any meaningful ability to plan beyond the next transaction.

The BRICS context makes this conversation especially useful.

Countries across the grouping are confronting different versions of the same pressures: large informal economies, technological disruption, inequality, youth unemployment, changing employment relationships and the challenge of extending social protection beyond traditional employment structures.

That creates an opportunity for South-South cooperation that goes beyond exchanging programme models.

The real value lies in examining the systems beneath them.

Which institutions are adapting successfully? How are countries responding to work that sits between formal employment and informality? What happens to social protection when employment relationships become fragmented? How should skills investment respond when labour demand itself is becoming less predictable? And how do we prevent digital transformation from simply transferring more economic risk onto workers?

These are not abstract questions for GrowZA.

They connect directly to our work across skills development, social investment, youth economic participation and the design of more adaptive development systems.

Our inclusion in the ILO Knowledge Series gives us an opportunity to bring that field perspective into a wider global conversation, while learning from institutions working through similar tensions across the BRICS economies.

It also reflects something we believe strongly about the next phase of development practice.

The future of work debate cannot only be about preparing people for changing labour markets. It must also examine the quality of the labour markets we are creating.

Africa unquestionably needs stronger skills systems, better transitions into work and deeper participation in the digital economy. But scale alone is not enough. Training hundreds of thousands of people into increasingly precarious forms of work cannot automatically be treated as success.

The next generation of labour policy will need to become much more precise about the difference between being economically active and being economically secure.

That is the conversation GrowZA will be taking into the ILO BRICS Knowledge Series.

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