Photo byPer-Anders Pettersson/Getty Images
South Africa remains one of the most unequal societies in the world. The statistics as reported by the World Bank are sobering — a Gini coefficient of 0.67 (2018), placing us among the most unequal globally; 63% of the population living below the upper-middle-income poverty line; youth unemployment at a staggering 45.5% (15 to 34-year-olds) and a general unemployment rate of 31.9% by the end of 2024.
Economic growth is stagnant, averaging just 0.7%, weighed down by persistent load-shedding, weak productivity and deteriorating public infrastructure, especially in transport and logistics.
Even with modest improvements in electricity supply and the formation of a Government of National Unity in 2024, the economy is projected to grow by only 0.6%. In addition, structural challenges remain deeply embedded.
But these indicators are not just numbers — they point to systemic failures that shape everyday life. One in four children is growth-stunted.
Four out of five grade four learners cannot read with comprehension. South Africa’s most disadvantaged rely on free healthcare at 3 800 public clinics and hospitals — but these are often plagued by broken equipment and medicine shortages. Only five out of nearly 700 facilities met 80% of the required performance standards.
These failures are not isolated but drive breakdown across interdependent systems. When a child goes to school hungry, their capacity to learn diminishes. Poor education reduces future employability and earning potential, entrenching poverty.
Weak healthcare systems compromise well-being and productivity. Infrastructure failures disrupt livelihoods and access to essential services.
For years, South Africa’s economic reality has often been described as a “dual economy”: one part formal, productive and globally competitive; the other informal, marginalised and excluded. While this framing has helped draw attention to exclusion, it may also obscure a more complex dynamic.
It suggests we have two separate economies, when in fact, we may be looking at a single, interconnected system — one where pressure and breakdowns in one area ripple across the rest.
What seems to differ most is not whether people experience shocks, but the frequency and nature of these shocks, and how equipped people are to respond.
For those with access to financial, social and institutional resources, it is often possible to “buy” resilience — to find alternatives when state systems fail, to access private healthcare, hire tutors for your child, own your car for transport and pay for security when public options break down. But these systems are often the only lifeline for those who rely entirely on overstretched public services. When they falter, there are no substitutes.
This is why the concept of fragility offers a helpful lens complementing the binary of “first” and “second” economies. Fragility helps us understand why a shock — electricity disruptions or a water outage — can have vastly different consequences for individuals depending on where they sit in the system.
It’s not just inequality in income or access, it’s inequality in adaptive capacity, in the ability to recover, find a substitute or for the system that serves them to learn from failure.
Perhaps this is where we should pay more attention — not just to what’s breaking, but to what’s adapting, and why. Some communities, platforms and institutions are withstanding stress and evolving because of it. These are signs of anti-fragility — the capacity to grow stronger through disruption.
If we can identify the right constellation of interventions — those that build redundancy (not waste but multiple pathways to access goods and services), reduce dependence on single actors (especially the state) and enable decentralised networks with diverse access points, we can begin to design systems that work better for everyone.
The goal isn’t for the excluded to “catch up” to a so-called functioning first economy but to reimagine the system itself: one that is adaptive, inclusive and capable of learning and improving through disruption.
Anti-fragility is more than resilience — resilience is the capacity to recover from adversity and return to a previous state or baseline. Anti-fragility, by contrast, is the ability to endure stress and to grow stronger through redesign. Where resilience is about bouncing back, anti-fragility is about adapting, evolving and thriving in the face of disruption. It’s more than a mindset; it’s a design principle for innovation.
In complex, interconnected systems like those in South Africa, where instability is the rule, not the exception, we can’t afford to stop at resilience. We need to design innovative systems that improve when challenged. We should keep this in mind as we celebrate World Creativity and Innovation Day on 21 April.
Anti-fragile systems build innovation into their DNA. They are structured to experiment, fail safely and use feedback to evolve. They reduce over-reliance on single actors — especially the state — by distributing capacity across networks of local institutions, enterprises and community platforms. They create multiple access points into communities where essential services, resources and opportunities can reliably reach people, even when formal systems falter.
We already see the seeds of anti-fragile design in practice across many platforms and organisations in the country. Only a few of the examples that I have had the pleasure to engage with include:
- Unjani Clinics, with over 250 care sites, decentralise healthcare delivery by empowering black women nurse-entrepreneurs to run locally owned clinics. This reduces pressure on the public health system, creates jobs and embeds access to an alternative healthcare offering within communities.
- FoodForward SA, South Africa’s largest food bank, supports over 920 000 people daily through a network of 2 500 community-based organisations. It turns systemic food waste into nutritional support for beneficiary organisations that provide services such as early childhood development to vulnerable communities, creating a circular, adaptive supply chain that flexes with demand and disruption.
- Ranyaka works in 21 townships across eight provinces, co-creating neighbourhood plans that embed local leadership, develop redundancy and interdependence across domains like land use, early learning, public safety and enterprise development.
These platforms are examples of how South Africans are not just delivering services — they are reconfiguring the architecture of service delivery. By linking private enterprise, civil society, education and government at the local level, they build systems that can absorb shocks, self-correct and grow stronger.
If we are serious about addressing inequality and building a more inclusive future, we must adopt anti-fragility as a core design logic for innovation. Not as a buzzword, but as a practical, scalable way to turn stress into strength.
That means investing in platforms that create options, decentralise capacity and harness local knowledge and intelligence. It means designing for learning, not just control. And it means building innovative systems that don’t just survive disruption but use it to get better.
Sara Grobbelaar is a professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and a research fellow at the DSI-NRF Centre of Excellence in Scientometrics and Science, Technology and Innovation at Stellenbosch University.
