BLACK youth are regressing and have lower educational levels and occupational status now than 20 years ago, indicating a “cocktail of disaster” for the future, according to a new report on youth published on Monday by Statistics SA.

Together with very high youth employment (35.9%), regressing educational outcomes mean that SA’s black youth could be trapped in poverty in perpetuity.

Statistician-General Pali Lehohla, speaking a briefing in Cape Town said the findings showed that black youth “are unemployed, they are involved in crime, they are hungry and they are not educated,” which painted a distressing picture for policy makers as it showed that their interventions had failed.

SA has also not turned its fast-growing youth population — knows as the youth bulge — into an advantage as other societies had done before it, as it failed to educate the youth and enable them to become valuable human capital. The growth of the youth population was now tailing off with population growth just over replacement levels.

“This is a cocktail of disaster for the future. It also means that we have failed to harness the demographic dividend. We had a youth bulge but that was not translated into human capital. It suggests a very difficult future,” he said.

Unemployment among youth — which includes people from 15 to 35 years old — rose slightly from 34.2% in 2009 to 35.9% in 2014.

While black and coloured youth have regressed in their educational achievements, whites and Indians have made progress. While absolute number of black and coloured students attending university has increased, the proportion of those who complete a degree as a share of the population has dropped. For whites and Indians this has gone up.