The youth development academies in KwaZulu-Natal are an audacious and innovative initiative to provide skills development to young people. They are managed by nonprofit organizations on behalf of government in a community-state partnership model. The government has invested vast amounts of money for the buildings, daily operations and capacity development for the nonprofit organizations' boards. Over time, a plethora of management and governance challenges were identified and these threatened the very existence of the institutions. This provided a motivation to undertake the research study on the management of these institutions. The study examined the effectiveness of management practices in supporting the youth development academy model. Agent-principal, resource-dependency, complexity and systems theories provided a theoretical framework which underpinned the study. A mixed method approach was adopted. The findings highlighted