Youth Employment and Cooperatives.

Youth face many challenges and overcoming these challenges are more likely when pooling human and financial resources, technical knowledge, networks and entrepreneurship skills. Youth are more inclined to change and to jointly embark on new and innovative opportunities. Youth in rural areas regularly need to be prepared to take over farming activities. However, agricultural cooperatives often suffer from old-style management and generate little income for their members, which make them not attractive for the young generation. Especially for these cooperatives, youths’ dynamism and skills can be of vital importance.
The Programme supports youth as one of its key priority groups. They represent the largest majority of unemployed people (or under-employed) on the labour market. Their knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviour are of vital importance in the implementation of sustainable agricultural and rural development programmes. Since youth are more inclined to change and to embark on new opportunities, COOPAfrica attaches a great importance to offering them an attractive package through an innovative, successful and vibrant business model that cooperatives may embody

COOPAfrica is partnering with the Youth Employment Support (YES) Jobs for the Unemployed and Marginalized young People (JUMP) (pdf file 54kb) to contribute to the poverty alleviation efforts through creating decent and sustainable jobs for the youth of poor and marginalized communities. The YES-JUMP project aims to help partner communities and youth groups find more socially responsible and community driven solutions to poverty alleviation, with at least 50% of its target group being young women.

YES-JUMP, established in Kenya and Zimbabwe, facilitates and supports entrepreneurship development, skills training, technical and financial support to local job creation schemes and strengthening small enterprises and cooperatives and business development services. The project strategy is to create a broader partnership between local stakeholders to implement priority projects for youth at the community level. The partnership between COOPAfrica and YES-JUMP is mainly focusing on the Challenge Fund component of the YES-JUMP project. The YES-JUMP COOP Challenge Fund provides youth groups and youth, increased access to micro finance services towards the creation of jobs. Projects funded through the YES-JUMP COOP Challenge Fund should comply with these two key criteria (access to micro finance for youth and cooperative development). In addition, projects submitted to the challenge fund should also describe the extent to which youth beneficiaries of the loans will/shall be provided with increased access to non financial services. The YES-JUMP project will then target its technical assistance interventions on the successful applicants and their clients/members in order to ensure that both financial services (through loans) and non financial services are accessible to youth (e.g. skills development, business development, etc.) with a view to ensure sustained job creation efforts.

YES-JUMP COOP Challenge Fund is launching in Kenya and Zimbabwe a competitive call for proposals, (pdf file, 45Kb) in partnership with COOPAfrica, to provide increased access to financial services for youths defined by the African Youth Charter as women and men between the ages of 15 and 35 years.

For more information on the call for proposals, application procedure and forms, please see the links in the right hand margin.