Ugandan youths to benefit from € 7 million skilling project
In a bid to stimulate job creation, the Z-Zurich Foundation has donated € 7 million to the Junior Achievement Uganda Project.
The multimillion partnership will allow Junior Achievement Uganda spread its operations to new countries namely Burkina Faso, DRC, Togo, Sierra Leone. In Uganda, over 10,000 youth will benefit from services such as mentorship, and linking Ugandan youth with global employers.
For the past over 40 years, Junior Achievement Africa has delivered hands-on, immersive learning in work readiness, financial health, entrepreneurship, sustainability, STEM, economics, citizenship, ethics, and more.
It has presence in 13 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and collectively reaches more than 300,000 youth in more than 3,000 schools each year. JA Africa Works in Côte d’Ivoire, Eswatini, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Z Zurich Foundation is a charitable foundation by which the Zurich Insurance Group delivers on its global community investment strategy. The social equity activities of the Foundation focus on young vulnerable people, apply filters to include sub-groups of vulnerabilities and consider activities around education, apprenticeship, mentorship and interventions contributing to a sustainable employability.
This charitable organization made a strategic decision to venture and fund Africa, and has chosen Africa’s largest and most-impactful youth-serving NGOs, Junior Achievement Africa as the beneficiary for a huge grant.
The money is expected to support creative youth to undertake several productive ventures to employ other young people.
There is a lot of support required to translate local challenges into global business opportunities.
Many young Ugandans are entrepreneurial by nature, but are limited in their ability to break down challenges around them like access to finance, in order to properly apply technology and innovation to solve the pressing challenges.
According to the National Planning Authority (NPA), Uganda graduates over 30,000 youth annually, yet only one in 10 finds a formal job.
Therefore, youths have been urged to be innovative and to create jobs.
In the cases of Solomon Odong, the CEO of Tumaini and Boris Mugisha, a co-founder of Tubayo travel app, self-employment has allowed them to employ others.
Odong and Mugisha, and several other beneficiaries of the Junior Achievement Uganda Initiative were in attendance as the non-government organisation announced a multi-million cash injection from the Z-Zurich foundation.
There is a lot of support required around being able to translate local challenges into global business opportunities. Many young Africans are entrepreneurial by nature, but are limited in their ability to: 1) understand and break down the challenges around them in order to properly apply technology and innovation to solve them; 2) capture value from the solutions they have created; and 3) realistically and ambitiously conceptualize what their solution and business model could become at global scale.
The JA Africa partnership with Z Zurich Foundation will support the creation of an African-centered curriculum design which will help build the problem-solving and design thinking muscles of the participants so that they are able to understand the complex problems around them and design sustainable solutions.
Exposing them to Zurich employees as global mentors and JA Africa alumni such as Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, who has founded not one but two unicorns in Nigeria, as African role models will help build the critical social skills and confidence necessary to validate their ideas and communicate them to a global audience of funders and clients.
Africa graduates 12m youth annually just for them to compete for the available 3m available jobs – what happens to the rest of the unemployed youth? Imagine if every entrepreneur African youth would hire 5 other youth...this would go a long way in virtually eradicating youth unemployment in Africa. Partnerships like Junior Achievement Africa and Z-Zurich come in to fill this gap by empowering these youth with: critical work readiness skills, digital, entrepreneurial skills, soft and hard skills set as well as life skills most in demand to succeed in a global economy.
