This week at SAP Connect, SAP unveiled the latest innovations designed to help companies build stronger, more meaningful relationships with their customers. In today’s world, customers expect intelligence, precision, and trust at every step of their journey.

SAP’s latest customer experience solutions are built to deliver on these expectations, empowering organizations to earn loyalty, drive growth, and create seamless, connected experiences.

In today’s market, loyalty and retention are the twin engines of repeatable business, the lifeblood of every organization. Earning and keeping customer trust has always been hard-won, but the bar is higher than ever. Recent findings from the SAP Emarsys Customer Loyalty Index show a five-point drop in “true loyalty,” customers who return without incentives. Only 35 percent of B2B customers reach strategic loyalty, defined as repeat purchases and long-term engagement. And nearly one-third of customers are lost to fragmented experiences. Brands now face a new reality: building lasting loyalty requires understanding customers and delivering consistent, connected experiences across every touchpoint.

Meeting the loyalty challenge: SAP Engagement Cloud and SAP Customer Loyalty Management

To help customers meet this challenge, SAP has created two powerful solutions: SAP Engagement Cloud and SAP Customer Loyalty Management.

Yesterday at SAP Connect 2025, SAP Executive Board Member Muhammad Alam shared the vision for SAP Engagement Cloud as the next evolution in enterprise engagement. Built on SAP Business Data Cloud and the SAP CX suite of applications, it orchestrates engagement across the enterprise: customers, suppliers, employees, and more.

It also connects every function — finance, HR, marketing, and service –– and uses AI to turn business data into actions that drive outcomes: better delivery, faster service, and stronger loyalty. SAP Engagement Cloud will unify real-time interactions across marketing, commerce, sales, and service. By connecting every customer touchpoint to operational data such as logistics, finance, and supply chain, organizations can deliver accurate offers, real-time service, and personalized experiences at scale. This is especially important as only 18 percent of B2B customers reach strategic loyalty, according to the SAP Emarsys Customer Loyalty Index.

With embedded AI and Joule, SAP Engagement Cloud automates decisions, accelerates campaigns, and supports multi-brand, multi-region operations, empowering teams to deliver consistent, predictive, and unified customer experiences from day one.

The solution will be beta in November 2025 and is expected to be generally available in the first quarter of 2026, with an initial focus on customer experience.

SAP Customer Loyalty Management empowers teams to deliver personalized experiences at scale by giving every customer a single loyalty profile, no matter the brand, region, or partner. With loyalty data unified and natively integrated into SAP Private Cloud ERP and SAP Business Suite, teams can instantly monitor promotions, track reward usage, and understand financial impact in real time. This actionable insight feeds directly into planning, forecasting, and supply chain decisions, enabling businesses to adapt quickly and serve customers better.

Loyalty isn’t a separate marketing project, it’s woven into daily business operations. By centralizing loyalty data, SAP Customer Loyalty Management helps organizations understand each customer deeply and deliver consistent, connected experiences across every touchpoint.

The solution will be available Q4 2025.

AI and intelligence: the next imperative

At SAP Connect, we introduced how Joule, SAP’s AI copilot, is transforming customer experience by embedding intelligence directly into SAP Business Suite. Joule is not another layer, it’s built into the foundation, enabling smarter decisions and faster execution across every customer moment.

AI assistants in Joule bring role-based intelligence to customer-facing teams across service, sales, marketing, and commerce. Each assistant is tailored to the user’s role and business context, coordinating a network of AI assistants within Joule to automate tasks like resolving cases, chasing invoices, optimizing catalogs, and surfacing insights. This orchestration enables teams to focus on driving outcomes rather than managing operations.

For instance, Digital Service Agent delivers fast, multilingual support by reasoning over customer context and company knowledge. It provides accurate answers, escalates when needed, and continuously improves, reducing manual workload and enhancing customer satisfaction. This is available now.

Deep research in Joule

With deep research in Joule, account planning moves beyond quick answers, delivering deep, strategic research and analysis in a single, connected experience. By tapping into SAP data, external intelligence, and trusted resources, users get richer insights for any business need.

Sales leaders and chief revenue officers can use the new account planning that leverages deep research in Joule to compress weeks of manual work into days. It synthesizes customer history, identifies key drivers, and drafts account plans, giving sales teams a complete, real-time view of every relationship.

Deep research in Joule will be available in beta December 2025.

Intelligent applications for customer experience

SAP Business AI also powers intelligent applications that help businesses turn data into action:

• Revenue Intelligence brings together data from CRM, commerce, and ERP to surface pipeline risks, customer health, and sales performance. Sales leaders and chief revenue officers gain a unified, real-time view to strengthen pipelines, improve win rates, and accelerate profitable growth.
• Consumer Products Intelligence enables manufacturers and consumer packaged goods companies to optimize trade promotions and customer-facing offers. Integrated with SAP Integrated Business Planning and SAP Analytics Cloud, it uses real-time data from sales, supply chain, and production to analyze margins, monitor performance, and support financial planning, ensuring CX strategies are aligned with operational realities.

These innovations are tightly integrated with SAP Business Suite, ensuring every CX insight is grounded in real-time, harmonized data. They are currently in restricted private preview and expected to be generally available in H1 2026.

Adoption that drives value

Building on the Customer Loyalty Index findings about the importance of connected experiences, seamless, guided adoption is essential to delivering value. That is why WalkMe is now embedded across all SAP Customer Experience solutions.

WalkMe is a digital adoption platform that provides real-time, role-based guidance – right inside SAP interfaces. No IT tickets required. Teams get help in the flow of work, with step-by-step instructions that minimize onboarding time and reduce errors. Leaders gain instant visibility into where users struggle, so they can address friction and accelerate adoption.

The path forward

Loyalty is evolving, and so are we. Our priority is to help brands earn trust and adapt quickly.

The SAP Customer Experience innovations introduced at SAP Connect are designed for this challenge. They connect engagement with execution through solutions like SAP Engagement Cloud, Revenue Intelligence, and SAP Customer Loyalty Management; turn intelligence into action with embedded AI and automation; and give teams unified, real-time data to deliver measurable results and stay ahead in a rapidly changing market.

See how your business measures up in the Customer Loyalty Index and the Buyer Loyalty Index. Explore SAP CX content at SAP Connect here.

Balaji Balasubramanian is president and chief product officer for SAP Customer Experience.

Today, SAP and Google Cloud are expanding their long-standing data and analytics partnership with the launch of SAP Business Data Cloud Connect for Google BigQuery—a new capability introduced at the SAP Connect event in Las Vegas that simplifies access to mission-critical SAP data products from SAP Business Data Cloud through bidirectional, zero-copy sharing.

By connecting Google BigQuery, the autonomous data to AI platform with agentic capabilities, and SAP Business Data Cloud (SAP BDC), SAP and Google aim to help enterprises of all sizes gain more immediate access to trusted, business-ready data for enterprise analytics and AI across their platforms.

For decades, enterprise data and analytics have existed in separate worlds. Mission-critical business data, rich with semantic context, has been locked within transactional systems. Traditional extract, transform, load (ETL) processes create data replicas that are difficult to govern, quickly become stale, and prevent businesses from acting on real-time insights, ultimately hindering digital transformation.

Our SAP and Google partnership ends this compromise. By eliminating data replication and unifying the data landscape, SAP and Google Cloud are empowering businesses to build intelligent agents, automated workflows, and predictive insights that are directly grounded in live, trusted business information.

As the first hyperscaler to adopt SAP BDC Connect, SAP BDC Connect for Google BigQuery enables organizations to unlock the true potential of their data and applications with secure and rapid access to SAP’s semantically rich and governed data products at scale, without the delays and complexities of data replication and need for ETL pipelines. Customers can flexibly combine SAP data with their other enterprise data in BigQuery and vice-versa to innovate with leading analytics and agentic AI capabilities.

“SAP and Google Cloud have a long history of empowering global enterprises to harness the power of data and AI,” said Christian Klein, CEO of SAP SE. “Bringing together Google BigQuery and SAP Business Data Cloud gives our customers choice without compromise, enabling them to fast-track their analytics and AI initiatives.”

“Businesses are combining intelligence and automation into every aspect of their operations,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. “By uniting SAP Business Data Cloud with BigQuery and Gemini models, we’re making it easy for enterprises to build a unified data foundation that breaks down silos and unlocks a new class of AI agents and applications.”

Innovation with SAP data products and Google BigQuery

The centerpiece of this partnership is the new SAP Business Data Cloud Connect for Google BigQuery. This is a zero-copy data fabric that enables seamless access to SAP BDC’s semantically rich business data with Google’s powerful data and AI ecosystem, including Gemini models and the Vertex AI platform. The result is a modern platform for data, analytics, and AI that enables automated, cross-functional business processes.

This bi-directional integration helps to deliver an enterprise-grade offering for building and scaling AI. With SAP Business Data Cloud Connect for Google BigQuery, customers can:

• Build grounded, trustworthy AI: Ensure the Google BigQuery AI models and agents operate on the most current and complete view of the business by accessing trusted semantically rich SAP data in real-time without copies.
• Deploy autonomous agents: Build and deploy intelligent agents using Google Cloud’s Vertex AI and Gemini that can automate complex cross-functional processes—from supply chain optimization to financial forecasting.
• Unleash deeper insights: Fuse SAP data through SAP BDC with unique, world-scale datasets only available on Google Cloud, like Google Maps geospatial data, Google Trends, and public datasets, to create unparalleled business context.
• Reinvent analytics: Move beyond dashboards and reports. Enable anyone in the organization to ask complex questions on Google Cloud of their business data in natural language and get immediate, intelligent answers.

Availability

Google Cloud will offer customer and partner incentives that fast-track the adoption of these joint solutions, enabling an accelerated journey to AI-infused data transformations.

SAP Business Data Cloud is available today in Google Cloud regions across Asia Pacific, Europe, and the U.S., with more regions planned. SAP Business Data Cloud Connect for Google BigQuery is planned to be generally available in H1 2026.

In addition, SAP BW, private cloud edition, which is offered through SAP BDC, is supported in more than 40 Google Cloud regions, helping our customers meet critical data residency and compliance requirements.

Every two years, the Ryder Cup captivates sports fans worldwide. Unlike any other golf tournament, the biennial event transforms an individual sport into a team competition, as the top 12 players from the United States and Europe face off in a head-to-head match play competition.

This weekend, the golf drama will unfold at the storied Bethpage Black Course in New York, as rivalry and camaraderie collide. For the first time, SAP will be at the heart of the action as a Worldwide Partner of the 2025 and 2027 Ryder Cup.

Transforming the Ryder Cup fan experience

Since its inception in 1927, the Ryder Cup has united millions of fans around unforgettable moments. Yet behind the emotion and spectacle lies immense complexity. Two distinct organizations, the PGA of America and Ryder Cup Europe, must come together every two years to deliver a seamless tournament experience.

Going into the 2025 event, the Ryder Cup turned to SAP for help in transforming what it means to engage fans across the two organizations. With a goal of moving beyond a “one-day” experience to building an “everyday” connection, the Ryder Cup wanted to ensure every fan — whether onsite or halfway across the world — feels immersed in the tournament, experiencing the excitement, emotion, and strategy as if they were on the course.

This partnership will allow the Ryder Cup to benefit from using SAP technologies to further enhance the experience for fans. SAP Customer Data Platform will unify fan data from multiple sources, creating a single, comprehensive profile for each fan. SAP Emarsys will then use that data to deliver personalized content across marketing channels. SAP Datasphere will harmonize customer and business data and help identify insightful correlations, making it ready for visualization in SAP Analytics Cloud, where insights can be turned into action. SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud are part of SAP Business Data Cloud.

Together, these solutions will help the Ryder Cup gain a deeper understanding of audience behavior, drive engagement, and deliver personalized experiences at scale, while paving the way for future AI-driven innovation and a globally connected fan journey. Beyond tournament week, this 360-degree view of each fan will provide insights that benefit both organizations year-round, improving planning, marketing, and engagement that can be scaled across other professional tournaments.

Shared values in action

The Ryder Cup is more than a sporting event. It is a showcase of teamwork, resilience, and strategy — qualities that are equally essential in business. At its core, every Ryder Cup moment is defined by a challenge that demands a solution, whether it’s a player navigating tough conditions, making a critical decision under pressure, or leading a team to victory.

Through this partnership, SAP highlights the performance and collaboration that drive success, inspiring organizations and individuals to bring out their best on the course and in business.

Looking ahead

As anticipation builds for Bethpage Black this weekend, fans will see and feel SAP’s presence throughout the tournament, from on-course signage to coverage on TV, online, and social channels.

Beyond the event, SAP and the Ryder Cup are laying the foundation for a new era of fan engagement, connecting millions of fans around the world and helping to create moments that will be remembered long after the final putt.

Today, success in customer experience is rarely defined by sweeping campaigns or one-time transactions. It is earned in the countless small moments that make up every interaction: a question answered instantly, a recommendation guided by intelligent insights, or a service engagement that anticipates a need before it is voiced.

These moments are the building blocks of delivering seamless and memorable experiences — and lasting loyalty.

At SAP, we believe every touchpoint is more than a chance to meet a need. It is an opportunity to deepen trust, demonstrate value, and strengthen the relationship between customer and brand. That belief is at the heart of the SAP Customer Experience (SAP CX) portfolio — now infused with the power of AI.

Our Q3 2025 release reflects this vision. Intelligence is embedded across the entire customer journey. Generative AI helps service teams classify cases the moment they arrive. Autonomous agents in commerce guide customers to the right products with real-time stock visibility. For marketers, AI personalizes campaigns and generates segment descriptions and translations, ensuring relevance at scale. For sales teams, AI keeps data clean and actionable, eliminating duplicates and surfacing the right opportunities at the right time.

 AI isn’t just about efficiency alone; it is about elevating every interaction into a moment where trust can be deepened and loyalty earned.

Here are the highlights from SAP CX in Q3 2025.

AI that drives results

From decision-making to customer engagement, AI-powered intelligence and agents streamline processes and remove friction. Teams gain the ability to respond faster, deliver smarter interactions, and grow with confidence while delivering customer experiences that feel effortless, reliable, and personalized.

SAP Service Cloud

• Business information extraction in cases: Save time by automatically extracting registered product information from the case description, using pre-delivered elements for business information extraction.

SAP Sales Cloud 

• Contact and individual customer duplicate checks: Maintain clean, accurate records by managing redundant contact and individual customer data. This generative AI capability checks for duplicates and returns a confidence score, leaving the decision-making in human hands.

SAP Emarsys 

• AI-assisted product finder: Enable marketers to use natural language prompts and keywords to quickly search and locate products for targeted campaigns. Automatic product catalog sync ensures you are always working with the most up-to-date data.
• AI-assisted segment description generator: Generate human-readable segment summaries to improve execution. This ensures that existing segments are easily discoverable with descriptions that are intuitive and straightforward.
• AI-assisted campaign translator (pilot): Translate email campaign copy flexibly and seamlessly within the editing workflow. Localize product descriptions across languages to quickly build, optimize, and launch multi-language campaigns.

SAP Commerce Cloud 

• Shopping Agent: Using product stock awareness to return real-time inventory data, the configurable Shopping Agent can display or hide out-of-stock products in its recommendations. This makes for smarter recommendations, reducing friction and abandoned carts. For B2B transactions, merchants can also choose whether the agent answers questions about bulk product availability.

SAP Revenue Growth Management

• AI-assisted promotion creation: Create new promotions quickly by getting recommendations for promotion names, when to run a promotion, what products to include, which spend type to use, and recommendations for discount type.

Scale smarter with greater flexibility

Scaling efficiently while providing flexibility for customers means optimizing operations, offering expanded channel options, and extending visibility to customers and partners.

SAP Emarsys 

• Microsoft Ads integration: Scale personalized ad experiences across the Microsoft Search Network, including Bing, Yahoo, AOL, and other Microsoft properties.
• Conversational messaging for LINE (SAP Early Adopter program): After expanding our offering to WhatsApp in the Q2 release, we now support the popular conversational channel LINE, giving marketers a direct way to connect with customers in the channels they use every day and making it easier to turn engagement into conversion.

SAP Commerce Cloud 

• Central order service: This feature for SAP Order Management foundation seamlessly integrates online and offline transactions, paving the way for flexible customer experience scenarios like “buy online, return in store” (BORIS) and “buy in store, return online” (BISRO).
• Availability push: SAP Order Management for sourcing and availability now allows customers to proactively send real-time product availability information to external systems like webshops and marketplaces, ensuring they have the most current stock data without needing to request it.

SAP Sales and Service Cloud 

• SAP Preferred Success: We are empowering our customers to make the most of their SAP investments with the business process management (BPM) masterclass. This interactive workshop helps participants pinpoint which processes to optimize, outsource, or remove for the greatest impact. Learn how to identify critical processes, define roles and responsibilities, and establish a sustainable approach to process governance.
• Integration review V2: A comprehensive solution launch checklist for SAP Sales Cloud and SAP Service Cloud Version 2 integrations ensures successful rollouts and compliance with SAP best practices. The checklist systematically evaluates authentication mechanisms, interface configurations, middleware settings, and SAP Integration Suite implementation. 

SAP Enterprise Service Management

Updates to SAP Enterprise Service Management include:

• Case summary enhancements: Sentiment trend and sentiment graph can now be enabled in the interaction summary for additional information on a customer. Internal and external case notes can be configured and used to generate the resolution summary overview.
• Custom services: Gain more flexibility and extend capabilities without modifying the core application. Integrate external functionality into SAP Service Cloud V2 with custom services.
• Template visibility and restrictions: Every document is also an opportunity to establish trust. Now you can strengthen document security by limiting template access to those who need it.

SAP Revenue Growth Management 

New to SAP Revenue Growth Management are:

• Custom KPIs: Assess the performance of your account and promotion planswith custom KPIs, tracking metrics that suit your planning and reporting processes. Save time by creating KPI profiles to define a set of standard pre-defined KPIs.

• Promotion calendar export to PDF: Reduce uncertainty, lower costs, and build relationships with better alignment on annual promotions and EDLP agreements with customers. Key account managers can now share a promotion calendar and associated promotion details in a PDF file, making collaboration easier and decisions faster.

Trust advantage in AI-powered customer experience

AI is now woven into the fabric of the SAP CX road map, guiding how data, processes, and experiences come together. This deep integration sets the stage for a new era of customer engagement, one where intelligence anticipates needs, adapts in real time, and continuously strengthens loyalty at every touchpoint.

Learn more about what is new in SAP CX Q3 2025

• Customer Experience Connect at SAP Connect
• SAP Commerce Cloud: What’s New  
• SAP Sales Cloud Version 2: What’s New 
• SAP Service Cloud Version 2: What’s New  
• SAP Emarsys release blog and teaser video
• SAP Revenue Growth Management webinar
• The Loyalty Revolution: Building Business Architecture for Value Co-Creation
• Beyond AI Pilots: Building Intelligent Customer Experiences

Balaji Balasubramanian is president and chief product officer for SAP Customer Experience.

This week in New York, business leaders from every corner of the world are uniting to address evolving global challenges and accelerate solutions. Across multiple events and stages, SAP is sharing how its artificial intelligence (AI) edge is helping leading companies shape the future of business by turning environmental, regulatory, and market pressures into opportunities for action.

AI, with already proven applications, can unlock insights to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 5%-10% by 2030. According to KPMG, over half of sustainability executives say one of their top actions in the next three years is expanding their use of AI to enhance ESG capabilities.

Most businesses have not yet realized AI’s full potential for sustainability. In fact, only 14% of companies are using AI today to reduce carbon emissions. But those ready to do so will gain a decisive advantage that goes beyond emissions reduction. SAP’s ERP-centric approach enables organizations to deliver sustainability outcomes with applications, data, and AI embedded into SAP Business Suite. With sustainability reporting, data processing, automation, and strategic insights, AI can navigate your business through today’s climate challenges and ensure tomorrow’s competitiveness.

Power on, ethically and responsibly

Scaling AI solutions comes with considerable energy and water usage. To ensure net benefit, this needs to be part of return on investment conversations. With robust governance and renewables-backing however, AI is able to reduce more emissions than it generates.

All SAP data centers are powered by 100% renewable energy and any emissions from use of third-party AI systems are calculated and included in the company’s Scope 3 emissions.

Used ethically and responsibly, AI can be the catalyst of your sustainable business transformation. Here are eight ways that businesses use SAP’s AI-powered systems to build their sustainable advantage.

Improve efficiency with automation

1. Compliance information processing

The SAP S/4HANA for product compliance, AI-assisted compliance information processing capability can automatically extract compliance information from updated documents and map the information to compliance requirements.

This can reduce costs in product compliance disclosures, reduce penalties and fines in environmental management, and automate processes to reduce the risk of manual errors.

This helps turn a 50-minute task into a five-minute job and reduce processing and evaluation costs by 90%.

2. Declaration image analysis

With the SAP Green Token, AI-assisted declaration image analysis capability, you can automatically extract data and information from sustainability declarations regardless of format.

This helps cut review time, eliminate manual error risk, and ensure your reports are ready for required external audits.

Without AI, it takes roughly five minutes to review, extract, and post information from declarations. With AI, it’s just 20 seconds.

3. Permit management

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, EHS environment management, AI-assisted permit management can read hundreds of pages in seconds, extract the compliance requirements, and propose clear tasks to meet permit requirements.

This AI-assisted capability can save days of permit review and interpretation, remove the need to hire external consultants, and lead up to an 80% reduction in environmental penalties and fines.

Your personal AI carbon consultant

4. Emission factor mapping

With SAP Sustainability Footprint Management, SAP’s AI-enhanced solution can calculate and assign emission factors directly to purchased products. Where actual supplier emissions data is given, it can source that from the ERP system. When estimates are required, it can automatically find the most accurate emission factors.

Audit-ready emission factor mapping turns a 10-minute manual task into a two-minute verification.

5. Report generation

In the SAP Sustainability Control Tower solution, you can generate comprehensive ESG reports in just a few clicks:

• Automatically generate reports that align with internal sustainability strategies and meet external requirements such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).
• Take data collection from a half hour to a half minute and report creation and drafting from 30 hours down to just five hours, all the while eliminating confusion and the risk of manual errors.

6. Carbon emissions analysis 

From reporting on today to planning for tomorrow, Joule, SAP’s copilot, can take current carbon emissions data and return actionable insights that help reduce emissions and guide corporate sustainability strategies. 

By combining financial and carbon data, Joule can create carbon intensity KPIs and can be your ultimate corporate sustainability consultant.

The AI safety officer for your EHS team

7. Safety observation reporting

Complex safety reporting procedures dissuade employees from reporting potential hazards. With the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, EHS workplace safety, AI-assisted safety observation reporting capability, basic users can input safety observations in natural language, and the AI model can process that into a formal incident report, prompting the user for any missing details.

This can increase the likelihood that employees report safety hazards and helps prevent severe incidents by identifying potential safety issues in advance.

8. Safety instruction generation

Your AI safety officer can generate clear safety instructions for specific equipment based on the latest risk assessments and job hazard analyses.

With SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, EHS workplace safety, AI-assisted safety instruction generation, the time and effort of manually prescribing and updating safety instructions can be dramatically reduced.

Solve today’s sustainability challenges while preparing for tomorrow

The right AI integration can ensure you future-proof your operations while shining a light on the path that drives competitiveness.

What sets SAP apart is our suite-first, AI-first approach that helps ensure sustainability isn’t an add-on, but a strategic enabler that can deliver measurable outcomes at scale. SAP’s one sustainability data model can drive consistent reporting, deeper insight, and confident decisions across every sustainability process, product, and partner network.

With a responsible AI partner, businesses can realize measurable financial returns on AI investments and unlock sustainability benefits; automate manual-heavy paperwork; identify emissions hot spots and steer their business toward a decarbonized economy; and make environmental impact tracking visible to all lines of business based on a reliable single source of truth. With an integrated set of capabilities, SAP Sustainability solutions help businesses address their sustainability needs holistically and across topics. The result is speed, trust, and traceability, which turn sustainability into strategy, not just compliance.

Get in touch to find out how SAP can help your business power on with sustainability solutions.

Monica Molesag is global head of Sustainability Communications at SAP.

Nearly 90 percent of the 1.8 billion young people between the ages of 10 and 24 in the world today, are in low-and middle-income countries. An estimated 22 percent do not have jobs and are not in education or training.

Globally, young people are three times more likely to be unemployed than adults. Edmond Shange is one of the many young people who have faced difficulties navigating the employment market right out of high school. “In South Africa there’s not a lot of opportunities when it comes to the employment sector,” the 27-year-old shared.

Making copies of a CV or resume and going to a potential employer to drop them off costs money, something in very short supply among South Africa’s unemployed youth. Despite this, Shange says that as many as 300 young people often queue up to drop off their CVs at a potential employer. “I faced a lot of challenges trying to apply for jobs,” he said. “It’s very tough for young people like me.”

Shange is not alone. “In Africa over 70 percent of the population are young people and another 4 million join the job market every single year competing for less than half a million new jobs,” said Nadi Albino, deputy director at UNICEF’s Generation Unlimited.