January 08, 2021

Connecting youth to employment opportunities

Mali

Nigeria

Burkina Faso

Most young people are faced with the growing challenge of unemployment in sub-Saharan Africa. An answer to this challenge can come from the agricultural sector. In order to help young people to create and develop their own business, 2SCALE has placed youth inclusion at the heart of its intervention strategy. The program seeks to fill the skills gaps that young people face in terms of employment.

2SCALE through its Opportunities for youth employment (OYE) approach is working to help youth innovate agribusiness ventures in order to create better self-employment opportunities. 2SCALE works with different value chain actors and partners to address critical life, technical and business skills gaps in order to respond to increasing needs of agribusiness companies’ investments.

Training to identify business opportunities

Production, processing, distribution or even input supply, several job opportunities are available to young people in an agricultural value chain. Identifying and seizing these opportunities at the right time to set-up your own business, was the focus of a series of training organized by 2SCALE in Mali, Burkina Faso and Nigeria at the end of December 2020. The objective of the training was to strengthen the entrepreneurial capacities of young people so that they can develop businesses and have secure jobs. A total of 600 young women and men took part in these trainings which aroused in them a great hope to close the year 2020, a year which has seen various forms of disorders including the Covid-19.

Among the young people who have participated in the training, some have graduated from schools, others dropped out and some are unschooled. As such, the training was conducted in the national languages to make the understanding easier. Having already some knowledge about the partnerships, participants were able to quickly identify opportunities and position themselves in the activities they found most favorable.

Meeting the market demand through eight modules

Through eight training modules, the young trained people have discovered all aspects related to entrepreneurship and economic empowerment. These eight modules aimed to build their capacity enabling them to have professional behavior in their workplace and also to address real situations such as conflicts. It was also about equipping the young people with necessary qualities to be a good entrepreneur, to understand the importance of diversity and social inclusion for the sustainable development of a company. Moussa Diassana, a participant in Mali testifies:

I learned a lot about youth entrepreneurship through this training. It was very beneficial since today I can do my own analysis on my strengths and weaknesses. I also learnt communication strategies to better sell my product.

At the end, participants expressed their ambition to start a concrete activity contributing to enhance the partnership’s activities.

In 2021, we will work with the business champions and other value chain actors to support more youth engagement within the market-led agricultural value chains. These interventions will help youth entrepreneurs to follow and benefit from identified employment and business opportunities.

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