The beneficiaries of the EPWP Social sector are afforded opportunities to undergo training to enhance their abilities in rendering improved social services while providing options for career path or exit strategies into formal and self-employment. Training is accessed through skills programmes and learnerships.

The EPWP Social Sector provides work opportunities to unemployed and unskilled people through the delivery of social development and community protection services such as:

• Early Childhood Development: Provide education and care to children in the temporary absence of their parents or adult caregivers. Services include provision of child health, nutrition, education, psychosocial and other needs within the context of the family and the community. The beneficiaries are provided with skills to increase their capacity to generate an income hence improving care and learning environment,
• Home Community Based Care: Provide basic health services needs by formal or informal caregivers employed in EPWP projects to people in their own homes or home based care that the community can access closer to their homes,
• School nutrition programme: The programme employs community members as food handlers to provide food to children from needy families and thus address malnutrition,
• Community Crime Prevention: It is aimed at encouraging community members by employing volunteers in EPWP projects to be active in helping to identify community safety priorities for their neighbourhoods,
• School Mass Participation: The programme provides work opportunities to sports coaches and encourages members of the public to participate actively in sports with the objectives of promoting good health, self-realisation, community development and social cohesion, and
• Kha Ri Gude (Tshivenda for 'let us learn') is a Mass Literacy Campaign aimed at inviting adults who missed out on their schooling, and who cannot read nor write, to join literacy classes provided across the country.

The overall coodinator of Social Sector is the Department of Social Development assisted by the Department of Basic Education and the Department of Health.