SAP officially joins GenU as Founding Member to Champion Opportunities for Youth
The partnership will unlock new education models for scaling up 21st century skills and access to jobs for young people.
New York, December 8, 2021 – During the inaugural Global Forum for Children and Youth, Generation Unlimited (GenU) announces that giant multinational software corporation SAP SE (SAP) has officially joined the global multi-sector partnership as a founding member.
Under the new partnership, SAP, UNICEF and GenU will scale transformative education models. Focusing on disadvantaged youth, these models will prepare millions of young people across the globe for decent work and active citizenship through life skills and job skills training.
Christian Klein, Chief Executive Officer of SAP SE, said: “Children and young people across the world are key to developing solutions to solve our biggest challenges—from climate change to rising inequalities.
“We want every child to reach their full potential. Achieving this means more than just access to education—it means access to quality education.
“We are proud to support GenU’s commitment to provide over 500 million young people with access to opportunities and training for employment, entrepreneurship, and social impact by 2025. And we invite others to join us to ensure a brighter future for the generations to come.”
Kevin Frey, Chief Executive Officer of Generation Unlimited said: “I am incredibly proud to announce that our long-term partner SAP has joined GenU as a founding member.
“Young people are reeling from a global pandemic that has disrupted their education and forever changed the labor market.
“Now, more than ever, we need committed private sector partnerships to invest in globally-scalable, job-relevant skilling and reform our education systems to ensure young people are learning the skills they will need to thrive,” said Frey.
Towards a new future
The world is facing a learning crisis. Every month, 10 million young people reach working age, but many of them never acquire the right skills to get a good job and engage in their communities. Young people have been facing a growing mismatch between the skills they are formally learning and those increasingly in demand by employers—making it clear that yesterday’s skills don’t match today’s job market.
As the world sets its sight to economic recovery, young people must take center stage. Partnerships between youth, education innovators, policymakers, and businesses are key, with skills as the core currency.
The SAP-UNICEF-GenU partnership will combine the organizations’ massive ecosystems of businesses, governments, civil society organizations (CSOs), and young people to support the development of standardized national curricula, workforce readiness programs, and in-depth research to address gaps in secondary education.
In 2019, SAP and UNICEF embarked on a global partnership to address workforce readiness by developing transformative education models that equip underserved young people with the hard and soft skills they need to be successful in a changing global economy.
Now, with SAP as a GenU founding member, the new partnership will take the ongoing collaborations in India, Turkey and Viet Nam to a global scale, where a growing number of interventions have seen the development of integrated curricula for life skills and social innovation skills, the introduction of Augmented and Virtual Reality education solutions, and the scaling of digital learning for secondary schools and technical and vocational education and training (TVET).
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Notes to editors:
UNICEF does not endorse any company, brand, product or service.
About Generation Unlimited
Launched by the UN Secretary-General at the 2018 UN General Assembly, Generation Unlimited is a leading global Public-Private-Youth Partnership on a mission to skill and connect the world’s 1.8 billion young people to opportunities for employment, entrepreneurship and social impact. Anchored in UNICEF, the partnership brings together global organizations and leaders including Heads of State, CEOs, Heads of UN agencies, and civil society champions with young people to co-create and deliver innovative solutions on a global scale.
About UNICEF
UNICEF works in some of the world’s toughest places, to reach the world’s most disadvantaged children. Across more than 190 countries and territories, we work for every child, everywhere, to build a better world for everyone.
