- Youth Enterprise Development Program (YEDP)
The Youth Enterprise Development Program (YEDP) aims to empower young entrepreneurs to transform their communities. The main objective is to empower the youths through training, mentoring and funding, enabling them to create business ventures for employment and wealth creation. The intervention seeks to address poverty and youth unemployment through entrepreneurship development initiatives. Besides, through ensurimg that the young men and women are engaged in productive activities, the project also is facilitating peaceful existence and cohesion in communities. The youthful energies are harnessed and directed into entrepreneurship and other productive ventures in the target communities.
The Youth Enterprise Development Program (YEDP) adopts a comprehensive approach to promoting entrepreneurship development that involves training, mentoring and business development support services.
Africa Initiative for Rural development applies a training model founded on comprehensive and integrated support systems which has four (4) key components
Integrated skills Development/Training
.Our training is tailored to cover both entrepreneurship, and technical skills. This is a three (3) months skills development program that takes the beneficiaries through modules that includes:
- Entrepreneurship/agribusiness
- Employability skills
- Financial Literacy
- ICT skills training
- Life skills: HIV preventions and Reproductive Health
Based on experience, the modules we focus on have proven to have a high impact on the graduates. The beneficiaries are facilitated to form into enterprise clubs for ease of training by AIRD. Training sessions/classes for each enterprise club is conducted once a week for 2 hours each day for 3 months (12 weeks). We also have ICT skills and Life skills training as cross cutting key areas that are integrated into our program.
Enhanced access to Business Finance
Small and Micro Entrepreneurs often find it so hard securing business capital from mainstream financial service providers as they are regarded as high risk and do not also have collateral to secure the loans. In addressing this challenge AiRD has been:
- Training the youth on Financial literacy to increase knowledge
- Promoting a savings and loaning scheme amongst the target communities (microfinance)
- Making referrals to financial institutions for those who need huge loan amounts
AIRD plans to develop an Enterprise Innovation Fund (EIF) that will be utilized in funding emerging youth entrepreneurs.
Mentoring: Business Start up and Growth Support
Once classroom training is over, the graduates are taken through a 9 month phase where they are provided with support to start and grow their business. During this period, Business Counselors/Mentors support the entrepreneurs individually and/or in groups to start and grow their businesses. Business coaching and Mentoring assists the emerging youth entrepreneurs in overcoming the initial hurdles encountered while starting a business such as identifying a suitable business location, record keeping, stock management, sourcing of supplies and customer service. Youth with promising business ideas are linked to business mentors who act as their sounding board and assist them to develop their business ideas.
Linkage to Employment
Job placement and internship linkages are critical activities of the program. Youth who are over 18 years and with identity cards are linked to placement firms for employment and internship opportunities. AIRD also directly seeks employment opportunities for the youth in various organizations.
Talent development and Vocational skills Development
We acknowledge that not all youth are meant for business. We take cognizant of the fact that we have very talented youth in our communities and who lack platform to identify, nurture and link this talents to the markets. Through this component, we design and implement projects that target talents.
Again, we work from the marketing front and are able to identify labour market needs and train youth on a set of marketable skills, preparing them for absorption into the market. Working in collaboration with a local partner Technical Community Technical Institute (TCTI), we have developed a social – market based model dubbed “Pay it Forward” that makes it possible to identify and train youth from poor backgrounds on a five (5) skills sets: plumbing, Masonary, painting, carpentry and electricals nd link the youth to jobs.
2. Women In Businesss (WIB):
The WIB project is aimed at empowering young women between 14 and 35 years in entrepreneurship and combines business, technical skills development and financial education with development and enhanced access to markets and business finance. The beneficiaries are as well trained in various life skills and ICT for business.
Our approach to economic empowerment:
AIRD embraces a comprehensive and integrative approach to promoting entrepreneurship development and has adopted a two-fold approach that involves training and business development support services (BDSS).
- The entrepreneurship training addresses unemployment and poverty by supporting the creation and expansion of business enterprises. The training seeks to change the thinking of young women and men from being job seekers to job creators, besides also stimulating innovation and creative and nurturing the same to real businesses. With idleness and hopelessenes addressed, benefiting youth become more focused, engaged and less vulnerable to missuse by politcians, peaceful citizens and also desist from engaging in crime.
- The BDSS is designed to equip the entrepreneurs with skills in management and leadership, integration of ICT platforms in business, product value addition, value chain development, quality assurance and market linkages.
Our Current Youth and Women Economic Empowerment Projects
- Improving sustainability and profitability of Boda boda enterprise: this project is being implemented in Homa Bay County, Nairobi, Nyeri, and Kwale
- Mentoring of ILO funded Y2Y grantees in running sustainable enterprises: Nairobi, Kisumu, Migori, Nyeri, Machakos, Nakuru, Busia, Tharaka Nithi and Makueni
- Career guidance and mentoring for schools: Across the country
- Women In Business: Skills development on going in Dandora and Korogocho ( 30 women being trained on bead work and crocheting); AiRD is working on marketing of this products to generate incomes for the women