The Youth Programme
Every year, thousands of young people graduate from the continent’s tertiary institutions.
The Strategy
Strategy I
Creation/Innovation of technology towards Sustainability in Africa
Strategy II
Promote international, regional and national Exchange of Information, Knowledge and Cooperation
Strategy III
Through the Empowerment Programme and the Entrepreneurship Forum, ASCENT will develop a mechanism for interaction and cooperation.
Strategy IV
Conduct Capacity Building and Awareness among the youth in Africa for the realization of sustainable job creation options for the youth
Strategy V
Mainstream the culture of Interning and Fellowships within corporate Africa
Strategy VI
Promote the use of Network Marketing amongst the youth in Africa
The Challenge
The basic challenges faced by Africa’s youth have been getting them first to believe in themselves and to imbibe positive aspects of their respective cultures and traditions. By extension, minimizing the craze for the indiscriminate adoption of alien cultures, many aspects of which are not conducive to their orderly growth and development.
Without doubt, the spectre of unemployment and idling constitute real threats to the survival of the youth and their capacity to contribute effectively to national development.
Every year, thousands of young people graduate from the continent’s tertiary institutions. The overwhelming majority of these young people troop to the public sector seeking employment.
Capacity Building Initiative for Transparency
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With a massive backlog of others unable to secure jobs in the previous years, the numbers keep growing year by year – a trend that is detrimental to the continent’s development.
This situation is exacerbated by the multitude of unskilled and semi-educated youth entering the work force, having only gone through primary years of education, often as a result of poverty. They are primarily manual and domestic labourers. Their lack of skill and minimal education predisposes them to minimal wages and virtually no career development.
The youth constitute a very important resource whose effective mobilization or lack of it has a serious impact on the socio-economic development of society. They are the most agile, dynamic, energetic and innovative segment of society and their abundant energy and talents, when properly tapped, harnessed and channeled, can contribute immensely to the positive transformation of the fortunes of communities.
On the other hand, if left unattended to or neglected and abandoned to their fate, they could become such a destructive force as would derail or undermine progress. They could, by their sheer numbers, misplaced utilization of energies and anti-social orientation, pose serious challenges to the enforcement of law and order and pose a veritable threat to social order.
The aim should be to properly instill positive values and ethics, so that young Africans mature to assume leadership roles and become useful to themselves and society as a whole.
It is estimated that in the next ten years, 500 million youth will be seeking employment in Sub-Saharan Africa alone. In this regard, ASCENT seeks to collaborate with established institutions to create a youth empowerment and entrepreneurship programme that builds the capacity of youth through training in life skills, entrepreneurship and management skills, internship programmes and more.
Emphasis will be placed on the creation of jobs in production, knowledge and skills-based areas of the economy—which are, in truth, the most viable, promising and sustainable.
The purpose of the programme is to stimulate creativity, innovation and empower the young people of Africa through entrepreneurship.
This will include initiating opportunities for governments, public and private sectors and civil society in Africa to interact with the youth for realizing creative innovation and job creation. The project will have following specific objectives:
Promote a culture of creation and innovation of technologies for sustainable development among African Youth;
Build self-esteem among young people through life skills training;
Provide work experience for youth through internships and fellowships opportunities;
Reward the top three inventors/innovators of technologies towards sustainability;
Reward promising young entrepreneurial Africans with incentives that progress innovations into entrepreneurial ventures and employment opportunities;
Provide a platform for capacity building and networking opportunities for young people to showcase their creative ideas;
Provide seed fund for young entrepreneurs, who have gone through the Empowerment and Award program, and wish to start up business ventures;
Promote Network Marketing amongst the youth in Africa.
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPEMENT
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SUSTAINABILITY
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