Uganda is brimming with an enthusiastic, innovative youth force, whose ideas are often buried before execution.
Yesterday, our partner, the Mastercard Foundation launched a strategy, Young Africa Works, a program that is here to identify the challenges faced by the youth, provide potential solutions and engage the young people in the best practices that they need to successfully own different enterprises.
Every year, about 400,000 youth enter the job market in search of decent employment opportunities. Yet, every year, only approximately 9,000 of these are able to get employed. As a co-creation space and a destination for innovation and entrepreneurship, we have made it our role to change the narrative. Together with the MasterCard Foundation Young Africa Works program, we created the NextWave, a platform for the youth to access better opportunities at employment, innovation and entrepreneurship, focusing on market making for the young people. We are empowering the next game changers and modifying the attitudes and mindsets of young people by preparing and providing necessities such as capital, connections to investors, access to markets among others, to enable them bring their ideas to life, and grow the economy with lucrative enterprises.
Women empowerment is an important subject matter that we address at The Village. In Uganda, women still own and manage significantly fewer businesses than men therefore, 70% of this program will be about empowering young women because they have frequently been more susceptible to many setbacks and business constraints, as they try to adjust and adapt to the growing business world.
The youth have the passion and devotion therefore, the Young Africa works program has emerged to build a favourable environment that will engage them and bring their ideas to life. The unpredictable and unprecedented global pandemic has proved to us that nothing can cease innovation, entrepreneurship and economic growth but taught us to keep dreaming big and never stop. Every problem is an opportunity to create great change in the world.
