Case Study: Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator connects 50,000+ young people to jobs and cuts data center costs 70% with Google Cloud Platform

Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator Solving the youth unemployment challenge

Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator is a South African social enterprise tackling extreme youth unemployment—more than 6 million young people are effectively shut out of the job market and unemployment for 18–35 year olds exceeds 50%. Harambee needed to scale digital services, make its large, multi‑touch dataset actionable, and provide mobile access and accurate location-based matching for job seekers while cutting infrastructure costs.

Working with DotModus, Harambee moved to Google Cloud Platform and built a cloud‑native stack (App Engine, Kubernetes, BigQuery, Maps APIs, TensorFlow, Cloud Dataflow, etc.) to power responsive mobile sites, geocoding and commute-aware ML matching, and fast analytics. The platform improved job‑seeker experiences, helped place more than 50,000 youth, is expected to cut data center costs by about 70%, and can scale to help millions of disadvantaged young people globally.

Harambee

Bryony Maxwell

Head of Marketing