This two-week course will be offered at the Sustainable Microenterprise and Development Program (SMDP)-Ghana in Accra from March 15-26, 2010.

Course Subjects:

• Implementing Sound Practices in Youth-Inclusive Financial Services
• Market Research with Young Clients
• Adapting and Developing Financial Services for Young People
• Partnering for Improved Service Delivery with Young People

The course has been designed and will be presented by Ms. Beth Porter and Ms. Veronica Torres of Making Cents International.

From 2006–2009, Save the Children and Fondation Zakoura Micro-Crédit (Zakoura) partnered to implement a youth financial services and livelihoods promotion project called “Linking Youth with Knowledge and Opportunities in Microfinance,” or LYKOM. The program included financial and business literacy training, savings promotion, and access to credit for youth businesses. This case study examines the challenges Save the Children and Zakoura faced and the ways the institutions sought to address these challenges.

These guidelines illustrate how microfinance can effectively support the elimination and prevention of child labour under certain circumstances, and they describe when the local context is not appropriate for microfinance. They provide guidance to organizations involved in eliminating child labour about how to utilize this tool so that households continue to have access to financial services after a donor-sponsored project has ended.

Making Cents International invites you to a half-day, hands-on session where you can learn how to adapt field-tested enterprise development curriculum resources to your specific youth programming needs. This workshop takes place one day before the Global Youth Enterprise Conference.

Featured curricula include:



EcoVentures International is hosting a series of workshops to assist organizations engaged in or interested in youth livelihoods programming.

The Michael & Susan Dell Foundation’s primary goal is to support and initiate programs that directly serve the needs of children living in urban poverty. Their focus areas are education, childhood health, and family economic stability through microfinance.

Cisco has created a new Global Impact Grant application as part of their Impact Cash Grants program. These grants fund projects which incorporate the internet in their development methodology, demonstrate sustainability, scalability, etc, and which address one of the key investment areas Cisco prioritizes. Organizations dealing with CYES issues will be particularly interested in the investment area "individual economic opportunity."

From their website:

Individual Economic Opportunity

This field manual by the Women’s Refugee Commission has been developed to provide practitioners with usable information and helpful tools so that they can design and implement more effective livelihood programs — programs that are based on market demand and are contextually appropriate; programs that build on the existing skills and experience within the target population; and programs that enhance the dignity and options for the displaced.

Save the Children and Fondation Zakoura Microcredit (FZMC) are implementing the “Linking Youth with Knowledge and Opportunities in Microfinance,” or LYKOM (which means “for you” in Arabic), project with seed funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and cofinanced with private funding from Save the Children and FZMC. The program includes financial and business literacy training; savings promotion; and access to credit for youth businesses.

Lessons learned include:

This report is the key output of the 2007 Global Youth Microenterprise Conference.