After more than 21 years of civil war, relative peace returned in 2005 to Southern Sudan with the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) between the government of Sudan and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM). The treaty has brought a fragile peace, but development efforts in Southern Sudan have been hampered by significant delays in making operational some of the vital commissions called for by the peace accord. As a result, Southern Sudan continues to struggle against the devastation caused by the civil war and remains one of the poorest areas in the world, with an estimated 90 percent of the population earning less than $1 per day. The war destroyed infrastructure, institutions and physical capital, crippling economic growth and livelihoods at all levels.

Within this context, ACDI/VOCA implements the Agricultural Market and Enterprise Development (AMED) program to improve the environment for increasing private sector employment opportunities in Juba, Yei and Wau. The project accomplishes this through small business development, skills and asset building, improved governance, and increased business productivity.

AMED is a three-year USAID-funded project implemented in collaboration with four other U.S. private voluntary organizations under the Volunteers in Economic Growth Alliance (VEGA). Despite the enormous challenges and difficult operating environment, the fragile peace under the CPA presents an unprecedented opportunity to turn the years of war, displacement and underdevelopment into a new era of peace and prosperity. AMED works in partnership with local government authorities and civil society, responding to requests for assistance to build programs and markets and to provide services in response to needs of emerging private enterprises.

ACDI/VOCA builds capacity for the development of agricultural markets, particularly the establishment and growth of marketing associations and cooperatives. By using international and regional volunteer consultants and in-house expertise, ACDI/VOCA provides technical assistance to various entities, including government, farmers and development organizations, on the market-oriented development of specific agricultural sectors as well as general agricultural markets. ACDI/VOCA has provided technical assistance to 175 government extension officers and 1,045 farmers through FaaB (Farming as a Business) training. ACDI/VOCA is also supporting the reintegration of displaced populations by providing livelihoods training primarily for youth, ex-combats and women to ensure sustainable income generation and increase employment opportunities.

Alex Gebrehiwot
agebrehiwot@acdivoca.org

Sept 2004 – Sept 2008

The USAID-funded Community Action Program (CAP) III builds upon the successes of CAP I and II in strengthening local government institutions and grassroots democracy in Iraq. ACDI/VOCA and its sub-partner, International City/County Management Association (ICMA), are implementing CAP III in four of Iraq’s northern provinces: Kirkuk, Salah ad Din, Diyala and Ninawa. The goal of CAP III is to increase the ability of local government to identify, articulate and better meet the needs of its constituency.

The program’s objectives are:

• Communities better articulate their needs and mobilize resources within and outside the community to solve common problems;
• Local executive and representative government in CAP communities better meet articulated needs of the community; and
• Civilian victims of conflict assisted by the Marla Ruzicka Innocent Victims of War Fund.

Meeting the needs of local youth is important to achieving these objectives, so CAP III incorporates several youth components:

• Apprenticeship Programs for Youth in Private/Public Sector
  The Apprenticeship Program was designed and implemented under the previous CAP programs to improve youth workforce capacity in areas of high youth unemployment. The apprenticeship program currently provides short-term jobs in combination with on-the-ground training for over 460 youth between 18 and 24 years old who are graduates of technical institutes and universities.
  
  Under CAP III, supervisors are being trained in how to mentor and coach apprentices, which improves employers’ human resource management. This addresses the needs of youth in the community, and also has the benefit of strengthening human resource capacity within the local government, which will be critical as local government becomes more decentralized. In addition, CAP III is introducing an apprenticeship program targeted at public health outreach. Through this program, young graduates, will assist health specialists in developing outreach and training materials targeting maternal and child health, water-borne diseases, and other community-identified critical public health issues.
  
  
• Youth Civic Action and Governance Summer Camps
  ACDI/VOCA will conduct two Youth Civic Action and Governance Summer camps for a total of 120 youth in the summer of 2009. The camps will bring together male and female youth from all four provinces who represent diverse ethnicities to engage them in activities that will teach community governance strategies through active simulation and participation. Through the camps, youth will be exposed to both diversity and commonalities among themselves, and they will learn how to effectively use conflict-mitigation strategies, team-building, and advocacy strategies as responsible citizens.
  
  
• Development of Youth Community Action Groups (CAGs)
  Under CAP II, the Quratoo Community Action Group in northern Diyala developed a strong focus on advocating for youth issues and developing youth leadership. It formed a Youth Action CAG, predominantly composed of men and women under 30 years of age who work in the public sector as teachers and government employees, to support and inform its work with and for young people. Currently, the Quratoo CAG focuses on promoting and advocating youth leadership to their sub-district council and higher levels of government.

Brandie Maxwell
bmaxwell@acdivoca.org

October 2008 - March 2010

YouthInvest will build on the experience MEDA has gained in youth and microfinance since 2002.

The goals of the project are:

• To support microfinance institutions (MFIs) in developing savings and credit products to strengthen the capacity of youth-run enterprises in Egypt and Morocco
• To assess and improve safety conditions in the workplace
• To support improved education and training opportunities for youth to ensure improved long-term prospects and to contribute to a higher quality workforce.

MFIs will be the primary points of contact with youth clients, delivering financial and non-financial services to young entrepreneurs and enterprises employing youth. MFI staff will be trained in these interventions, and will in turn deliver them to working youth and business owners as appropriate.

Workforce readiness training will be delivered by specialist youth-serving organisations; MFIs could
potentially provide linkage support to trained youth, by connecting them to high-growth clients. Within five years, YouthInvest will directly touch the lives of over 50,000 young people - connecting them with innovative financial products and services that will build their economic prosperity, improve their working lives, enhance their workplace safety, and lead to a better quality of life for their families and themselves.

Jennifer Denomy, Project Manager
jdenomy@meda.org

September 2008 to 2013

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

loveLife is the national HIV prevention program for youth in South Africa. Over the next two years, it is focusing on the Make Your Move Campaign, the goal of which is to change the mindsets of youth to understand that change is possible through small actions on a daily basis that can help them to protect themselves from HIV/AIDS and to make positive steps towards a socially and economically productive life.

To support the campaign, the South African Institute for Entrepreneurship (SAIE) is developing entrepreneurship and life skills tools that simulate choices that youth are faced with every day. These tools make it possible for youth to understand and discuss dilemmas and trade-offs in a safe environment, helping them to make positive choices in the real world. Part of making those positive choices relies in being able to make sound financial decisions. SAIE’s entrepreneurship curriculum addresses basic financial literacy while training youth to think about business and their life from an entrepreneurial perspective and preparing them with skills to help them to successfully achieve their personal, career, or business goals.

To implement the program, unemployed youth aged 18-25, called groundbreakers (gBs), are trained to guide a team of volunteer youth ages 12-17 through the different tools so that they utilize the entrepreneurship and decision-making skills on a day-to-day basis, and in turn can be positive leaders amongst their peers. Currently 95% of 15-year-old South African youth are HIV-negative, and loveLife hopes that by training older youths to be positive role models for their younger peers, they can help to keep them away from risky behaviors and to make healthy life choices. gBs in the program are additionally equipped with skills that can help them to gain employment or to start their own business.

Robin Coxson
robin@entrepreneurship.co.za

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.

IDEJEN

Kate Davenport
kate@eco-ventures.org

In October 2007, USAID’s Displaced Children and Orphans Fund, in close collaboration with the Microenterprise Development office, initiated the STRIVE (Supporting Transformation by Reducing Insecurity and Vulnerability with Economic Strengthening) Program. A five-year, $16 million effort, STRIVE uses market-led economic strengthening initiatives to benefit vulnerable children. In doing so, the program aims to fill current knowledge gaps on effective approaches to reducing the vulnerability of children and youth.

Managed by the Academy for Educational Development (AED) in concert with technical advisors from Action for Enterprise, ACDI/VOCA, CARE, MEDA, Save the Children, the IRIS Center and USAID, STRIVE is implementing up to five field projects in Africa and Asia between 2008 and 2012. Each project is pursuing a unique economic strengthening approach, ranging from savings-led finance to workforce development to value chain interventions. STRIVE is tracking and documenting the impacts of these diverse interventions on child-level indicators related to both economic (financial), and non-economic (e.g. health, nutrition, education) vulnerability factors. As a result, STRIVE aims to identify and demonstrate interventions that can sustainably increase incomes and document how such increases improve (or fail to improve) the lives of children.

• Afghanistan: Secure Futures (ASF), AED and MEDA

• Liberia: Agriculture for Children's Empowerment (ACE), ACDI/VOCA
• Mozambique: STRIVE Mozambique, Save the Children US
• Philippines: STRIVE Philippines, Action for Enterprise (AFE)
• STRIVE Monitoring and Evaluation, The IRIS Center

Margie Brand
STRIVE Program Director
AED
Center for Enterprise and Capacity Development
1825 Connecticut Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20009
USA
margie@eco-ventures.org