The Youth Employment Support (YES) Jobs for the Unemployed and Marginalized young People (JUMP)

The focus of the project is youth employment creation. For this purpose, the project is assisting local communities in selected districts in rural and urban areas, in collaboration with workers’ and employers’ organizations, to create 1,000 decent jobs (more than half will be for young women). This is being achieved through the facilitation of entrepreneurship, technical, vocational education and life skills training linked to exisitng opportunities and boosting youth-led small enterprise and cooperative development with access to microfinance for pilot projects.
The national implementing arrangments of the project are its National Steering Committee (NSC) and Technical Working Group (TWG) at the national level; the Pilot project Implementation Committee (PPIC) at the district level and Local Community Facilitators (LCFs) at project level, in which the project has created a broader partnership between the unemployed Youth groups, Government (Ministries of youth, labour, gender, sme development and local government), Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), and the Employers Confederation of Zimbabwe (EMCOZ) including Zimbabwe Association of Micro-finance Institutions (ZAMFI).

To date, Youths in Gokwe South Rural District benefited from the ILO Know About Business (KAB) training as well as on Cooperative Development through the Ministry of SMEs and formed a credit and savings cooperative (SACCO) registered on 18 February 2010. More than 800 youths have saved more than US$7,000 and have started a youth-to-youth lending scheme through the SACCO.

The ILO YES JUMP project has instituted a high-level national steering committee actively involving government, workers and employers organizations with a strong sense of ownership