Ethiopia

Youth employment and youth meaningful engagement

Objective

Youth are not merely beneficiaries but critical partners in shaping their own futures and fostering resilience in displacement-affected areas. The ILO, through the PROSPECTS partnership, aims to ensure meaningful youth engagement by establishing mechanisms that enable forcibly displaced persons (FDPs) and their host community youth to actively participate in the design, implementation, and monitoring of programmes. Our objective is to empower young women and men as agents of change, ensuring their voices and unique perspectives inform policies on employment, skills development, and entrepreneurship, thereby promoting Decent Work opportunities and fostering genuine social inclusion and cohesion.

Key Activities

Youth-to-Youth Fund (Y2Yf): The ILO, in partnership with Edukans Foundation, is implementing the Youth-to-Youth Fund (Y2Yf) programme in Ethiopia.

Y2Yf is a competitive grant scheme designed to support youth-led organizations with funding, capacity building, and direct technical assistance to implement innovative, small- scale projects on youth entrepreneurship as a means to create decent employments for youths.

10 youth-led organizations were selected through a rigorous process and they are now implementing their business ideas in Addis Ababa and the Somali region, empowering 1,000 youths from both refugee and host communities.

Youth Network Committee: Establish a Youth Network Committee which is serving as a youth coordination platform for the meaningful engagement of young people to provide input in the design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of the PROSPECTS program.

ILO Youth Leadership Academy: ILO designed and delivered the ILO Leadership Academy for meaningful youth engagement and employment. The Academy is deigned to build the capacity of the youth and create champions of youth employment.

Youth rights at work: ILO contextualized the global Right at Work Youth Guide to the Ethiopian context and tailored it to the needs of young refugees and youth in host communities, and integrated it into training offers of PROSPECT partners at the country level. This allows the ILO to provide capacity building for the ILO social partners and young people on meaningful youth engagement and youth rights at work.

National Work Culture and Ethics: ILO is supporting Ethiopia’s efforts to enhance work culture and ethics through the “National Work National Work Culture and Ethics Strategy and implementations Culture and Ethics Strategy and Implementations Project.” This initiative is being implemented in collaboration with the Entrepreneurship Development Institute (EDI) and the Ministry of Labour and Skills (MoLS). In April 2024, ILO and EDI formalized their partnership through an Implementation Agreement under the ILO PROSPECTS program.

ILO’s support is instrumental in guiding the development of a comprehensive national strategy aimed at improving work culture across the country. The project’s overarching goal is to conduct research, formulate strategic frameworks, and implement training programs that foster a competitive and skilled workforce—ultimately enhancing employability, job retention, productivity, and organizational performance.

Partners