Building the capacity of youth to be workforce-ready and equipped with entrepreneurial skills is a common method of addressing economic development needs in economies in which youth are the largest sector of the population and/or the sector of population that has the lowest employment rates. It is particularly important in post-conflict areas, with many children acting as heads-of-households and without the skills to provide for their families through employment or entrepreneurship. However, youth are often guided into enterprises that have low market potential, that are not meeting immediate community needs, that are socially or environmentally unsustainable, or that are replications of other businesses already run extensively throughout the community. By assessing opportunities for youth prior to their training, and incorporating an understanding of the need to assess the environmental implications of any business or industry development, and relating real growth opportunities to resource availability, these programs can truly achieve success and sustainability.
With this in mind, EcoVentures International (EVI) has been working with the PAS (Preparing Ourselves for Work) program in Timor-Leste to identify viable employment and enterprise opportunities to inform a training program for over 2,500 rural youth, ages 18-30. In the first phase of the project, EVI conducted a detailed market analysis of growing sectors of the Timorese economy and identified suitable entry points for youth. The goal is to introduce livelihood opportunities that are environmentally sustainable and build transferable skills for long-term employment and adaptability. Examples of such sectors include: bamboo, aquaculture, geotextiles, solar energy, and coconut processing, among others.
Each PAS participant will complete a year-long training program designed to build capacity in several core areas including: life skills, technical work skills, financial literacy and entrepreneurship skills. Through experiential, hands-on learning in a selected track, youth will then determine how to best utilize the financial capital they have accumulated. The research and tools EVI produced will inform the directions that program staff guide youth along each of these tracks, as well as the specific types of service opportunities they engage in during the training.
David Sturza
david@ecoventures.org
Tanzania’s urban areas do not have formalized systems for the disposal of used plastic bottles and bags. Piles of plastic waste accumulate in waterways and along streets in neighborhoods across Dar es Salaam, creating breeding environments for malaria-carrying mosquitos, allowing unsafe chemical seepage into water sources and soils, and developing generally unsanitary conditions in dense urban areas. To address environmental impacts of plastic use and production in Dar es Salaam and provide youth with simple after-school income-generating activities and training in personal and environment health management, EcoVentures International (EVI) and the Environmental Enterprise Development Initiative (EEDI), a coalition of cross-sectoral local organizations originally organized by EVI, worked together on a basic value chain assessment of the plastics recycling industry.
There are several plastics companies in Dar es Salaam manufacturing plastic shoes, buckets, and fences. Until 2005, these plastics companies imported the virgin plastic inputs for the manufacturing process. The EVI/EEDI assessment highlighted micro and small enterprise opportunities for unemployed youth in processing used plastics for recycling and reuse in the local plastics industry. An EEDI partner, Environment Based Poverty Alleviation, established a start-up enterprise for plastics collection and recycling, beginning by working with a few older jobless youths sourcing plastics from dump sites.
In order to reach the large volumes of plastics demanded, the enterprise tapped into the youth population to provide them with an easy way to contribute to the clean-up of their community, instilling a sense of social responsibility, and to generate income in a way that would not interfere with school activities. Youth are trained in basic protective health and sanitation skills and provided with protective equipment to use when doing their individual collection.
As the enterprise develops it has been able to take advantage of relationships with key market actors and grow its operations, first by contracting trucks to transport the plastic to a sorting facility. Financing from plastics manufacturers who used the lower-cost recycled plastic product facilitated investment into recycling equipment and expanded their capacity for production of recycled plastic pellets that had even more value to the plastics manufacturers in the region. The recycling enterprise has retooled its business model to make plastics processing and pelletization its primary function, and it continues to contract a network of youth plastics collectors to feed the demand for plastic waste while providing an important service of removing harmful waste plastics from communities, enabling youth to create a safer community while contributing to their own and their families’ well-being.
Kate Davenport
kate@eco-ventures.org
Some of the most successful youth empowerment initiatives are those that are started by visionary youth who understand the issues and challenges that they and their peers face and have a visionary perspective on how to improve their situation. Such is the case in the Kibera slum of Nairobi, where the youth-initiated and youth-run Kibera Community Youth Program (KCYP) has been offering jobless, vulnerable youth positive activities, such as sport and drama, to provide an alternative to more destructive activities prevalent in the community, such as drugs, gangs, and prostitution. They also have health education programs to inform youth about HIV/AIDS and associated risk factors and protective measures.
In order to support their activities, the leaders of KCYP realized that they needed a sustainable form of income. They wanted to be able to provide a service that could generate income while continuing to serve their mission of advancing the well-being of the youth of Kibera. A need cited in the community was a lack of access to information, which in Kibera comes primarily through radio and cell phones. However most individuals in Kibera lack access to electricity to charge their phones and/or do not have free income for the continual purchase of batteries to power their radios. A potential solution was identified in portable mini-solar panels that could be manufactured at low-cost by the youth of KCYP.
EcoVentures International, a long-time partner of KCYP, worked with the organization to provide technical assistance with business plan development and with building sustainable market linkages for the mini-solar panel business. Youth are trained in the assembly of panels and proceeds from the sale of the panels are shared between the individuals and the organization, providing these vulnerable youth with an income generating opportunity while helping to sustain the organization’s community activities that provide additional opportunities and benefits to many more youth and street children in the Kibera community, engaging them in a positive, peer-structured environment.
Kate Davenport
kate@eco-ventures.org
Building the capacity of youth to be workforce-ready and equipped with entrepreneurial skills is a common method of addressing economic development needs in economies in which youth are the largest sector of the population and/or the sector of population that has the lowest employment rates. However, so often youth are guided into enterprises that have low market potential, are not meeting immediate community needs, that are socially or environmentally unsustainable, or that are replications of other businesses that are already run extensively throughout the community. By assessing opportunities for youth prior to their training, and incorporating an understanding of the need to assess the environmental implications of any business or industry development, and related real growth opportunities in regards to resource availability, these programs can truly achieve success and sustainability.
EcoVentures International (EVI) is working with Haiti’s IDEJEN Program (L'initiative pour le développement des jeunes en dehors du milieu scolaire), analyzing various sectors in Haiti’s economy for opportunities for sustainable youth business development or employment. The country-wide IDEJEN program, funded by USAID through the EQUIP III program and run by the Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC) is aiming to provide employment and business development opportunities for some 10,000 out-of-
school youth over the next two years. To support this effort, EVI is providing research and capacity-building for local implementing partners on market-relevant and sustainable businesses opportunities that can be started quickly and with high growth and employment potential.
By analyzing different formal and informal value chain sectors, EVI is identifying high-potential sectors towards which youth trained in these programs might be directed. An additional piece to this is the development of tools that youth and staff at the IDEJEN centers can use to understand value-chain methodologies and to continually analyze market opportunities, enabling them to think through how to apply skills in which the youth are trained and ensuring that the training that youth receive will continue to be relevant to the youth and to the industries in which they eventually participate.
There are a number of projects currently underway in Haiti for the indirect development of environmental enterprise, and future work will connect players in some of the stronger-opportunity sectors to leverage their work and provide industry training and apprenticeships to youth to help feed the growth. Current sectors being investigated include mini-solar, bamboo construction, biomass fuel briquetting, and sustainable aquaculture.
Kate Davenport
kate@eco-ventures.org
Deforestation resulting from increased population pressure on ever-decreasing forest resources is a well-known, critical issue in many parts of the world. Women and children are typically responsible for fuel collection and production, time-consuming activities that take additional time away from opportunities for schooling and income generation, which are both important to reducing youth vulnerability.
Through the Future Fuels program, EcoVentures International (EVI) is exploring enterprise opportunities for women and caregivers in alternative, environmentally-sound fuel production and sales that would reduce the amount of time necessary for fuel collection and production, increase household incomes, and create a healthier indoor environment with cleaner-burning fuels.
The program spurred from working with local partners during the establishment of the Environmental Enterprise Development Initiative (EEDI), a network of organizations focused on utilizing environmental business development to address community issues in Lushoto, Tanzania. A distinct opportunity was located in the sawdust waste generated by the area’s numerous logging mills. Typically, the sawdust is burned in large piles in the open air, but EEDI partners identified it as a raw material for fuel briquette enterprise development.
Fuel briquette enterprise development presented a potentially viable business alternative to charcoal production, a critical factor in local biodiversity and forest cover loss, both of which are natural resource bases critical for stability of the local economy. There are a number of existing technologies of varying scales to convert biomass waste into solid fuels, and EVI worked with its partners to identify an approach that uses low-cost production machinery that would be accessible to low-income women entrepreneurs. By working with women, the primary sellers of charcoal, the program could tap into existing market structures to incentivize natural resource management practices that complement rather than compete with household needs.
In 2007, EVI initiated an action-research program, working with partner organizations in the EEDI and groups of women currently involved in village savings groups, to test the effectiveness of the technology as well as the viability of briquette production as an enterprise by testing markets in different municipalities of Tanzania and Uganda. A next step of the program is to work on market linkage development between producers in rural areas and high-demand municipal end-markets. By developing these market linkages prior to engaging vulnerable women entrepreneurs, risk for the women will be mitigated, ensuring economic advancement and a better quality of life for children and youth in their care.
The program is also active in Tanzania
Megan Hill
megan@eco-ventures.org
Deforestation resulting from increased population pressure on ever-decreasing forest resources is a well-known, critical issue in many parts of the world. Women and children are typically responsible for fuel collection and production, time-consuming activities that take additional time away from opportunities for schooling and income generation, which are both important to reducing youth vulnerability.
Through the Future Fuels program, EcoVentures International (EVI) is exploring enterprise opportunities for women and caregivers in alternative, environmentally-sound fuel production and sales that would reduce the amount of time necessary for fuel collection and production, increase household incomes, and create a healthier indoor environment with cleaner-burning fuels.
The program spurred from working with local partners during the establishment of the Environmental Enterprise Development Initiative (EEDI), a network of organizations focused on utilizing environmental business development to address community issues in Lushoto, Tanzania. A distinct opportunity was located in the sawdust waste generated by the area’s numerous logging mills. Typically, the sawdust is burned in large piles in the open air, but EEDI partners identified it as a raw material for fuel briquette enterprise development.
Fuel briquette enterprise development presented a potentially viable business alternative to charcoal production, a critical factor in local biodiversity and forest cover loss, both of which are natural resource bases critical for stability of the local economy. There are a number of existing technologies of varying scales to convert biomass waste into solid fuels, and EVI worked with its partners to identify an approach that uses low-cost production machinery that would be accessible to low-income women entrepreneurs. By working with women, the primary sellers of charcoal, the program could tap into existing market structures to incentivize natural resource management practices that complement rather than compete with household needs.
In 2007, EVI initiated an action-research program, working with partner organizations in the EEDI and groups of women currently involved in village savings groups, to test the effectiveness of the technology as well as the viability of briquette production as an enterprise by testing markets in different municipalities of Tanzania and Uganda. A next step of the program is to work on market linkage development between producers in rural areas and high-demand municipal end-markets. By developing these market linkages prior to engaging vulnerable women entrepreneurs, risk for the women will be mitigated, ensuring economic advancement and a better quality of life for children and youth in their care.
The project is also active in Uganda
Megan Hill
megan@eco-ventures.org
