Stats SA’s Quarterly Labour Force Survey for the first quarter of 2026 shows 60.9% of young people aged 15-24 are unemployed ― nearly 4-million young South Africans. Many young people who passed matric and dreamt of a productive future have sadly discovered that basic education can no longer guarantee employment. The costs of further education are also limiting for the underprivileged.Enter Nozuko Mzamo and her Global Student Support Platform (GSSP), a mobile app that asks: what if we stopped treating the journey from education to employment as “disconnected hurdles” and started treating it as a single, navigable pathway?Mzamo notes that the transition from student to employee is fraught with fragmentation and disconnected hurdles.“Every institution is solving one piece of the puzzle in isolation. Universities manage admissions,” Mzamo said. “NSFAS [National Student Financial Aid Scheme] manages funding. Setas [Sector Education and Training Authorities] manage skills. Companies manage recruitment. Each doing their part, but no-one holding the full journey together.”She said the cost of this fragmentation is borne entirely by young people who lack the social capital to navigate a system that assumes they already know how it works. If you’re a first-generation student from a rural village or township, you probably don’t know what questions to ask, let alone which portal to visit. “The system assumes a level of social capital that millions simply don’t have,” Mzamo said.Here’s the uncomfortable truth. In 2025, more than 900,000 grade 12 learners sat for their final exams. Public universities absorbed only 26%. Technical and vocational education and training colleges took in 19%. Community education and training colleges enrolled 13%. Hundreds of thousands of others completed matric and still found no clear pathway, mostly limited by affordability.Mzamo recalls sitting in boardrooms where funders lamented the undersubscription of bursary programmes. She also attended township career fairs and spoke to ambitious grade 12 learners, and they revealed that they had never heard of these bursary programmes.“That gap isn’t a failure of ambition on either side,” Mzamo said. “It’s a structural failure of information flow. The bursary exists. The qualifying student exists. But they never connect because one lives inside a corporate intranet and the other has no way of knowing where to look.”Mzamo said this is where her GSSP comes in to save the situation.GSSP offers audacious simplicity: a single, free app covering the entire journey from figuring out what to study, finding funding and accessing psychosocial support to landing that first job. In private beta, the platform attracted more than 4,200 users who generated more than 1,300 click-throughs to bursaries and more than 2,100 to job listings.Mzamo said the data on user intent surprised her. “We assumed bursaries and funding would dominate. But the top user intent is employment, with 45% actively looking for jobs. They’ve done the work. Now they need the door.”The platform’s most courageous inclusion is psychosocial support.Youth unemployment isn’t just economic; it’s an identity crisis. When a young person sends out 50 CVs and there is no feedback, the narrative becomes: “The problem is me.”“We include psychosocial support because skills and information alone aren’t enough,” Mzamo said. “A young person who has lost hope won’t click on an opportunity even when it’s right in front of them.”GSSP is free for the youth, sustained through enterprise subscriptions and recruitment partnerships. The proof of concept is compelling: across Mzamo’s edtech’s Ukiyo-administered programmes, 85% of participants are employed within three months of graduation. That number opens boardroom doors.Partners such as Thrive Accommodation, The LINK by Airlink and Emeris are already on board.“For a corporate, this isn’t charity,” Mzamo said. “It’s strategic alignment. Their skills development spend has to go somewhere; GSSP gives it a home with measurable outcomes, broad-based BEE compliance and ESG [environmental, social, and governance] reporting.”The biggest hurdle is data costs. “That is the barrier I lose the most sleep over,” Mzamo said. “We can build the best platform and if a young person can’t afford the data to access it we’ve solved nothing.”What makes GSSP radical is its refusal to accept South Africa’s capacity constraints as the end of anyone’s story. The platform surfaces international exchange programmes, global scholarships and work pathways abroad.“When the local system reaches its ceiling, our young people need to know the world is bigger than what’s available at home,” Mzamo said. “That is not a luxury. For many, it is a necessity.”Can Mzamo’s GSSP finally unify South Africa’s broken education-to-employment journey? Too soon to answer definitively. But Mzamo’s definition of success offers a powerful yardstick. “The day I can point to a cohort of young people from underserved communities who moved from access to GSSP, to bursary, to graduation to employment with their dignity intact ― that is success,” she said.• Lourie is founder and editor of TechFinancials.Business Day