The Kenya Youth Empowerment Program also known as Ninaweza was a 24-month youth employability program launched in 2011. It was funded by the World Bank and Microsoft, coordinated by the International Youth Foundation and implemented by the African Centre for Women, Information and Communications Technology. The program targeted young women aged 18-35 years who have completed high school, have been out of school for at least one year, are unemployed, and are living in the informal settlements around Nairobi. The purpose of the program was to improve the earning capacity of young women.
It provided young women with technical training in information and communications technology (ICT), training in life skills, work experience through internships, and job placement support. The ICT training was focused on computer hardware and software, entrepreneurship, and business process outsourcing. The life skills component addressed areas such as self-awareness, emotional intelligence, problem-solving, goal setting, job searching and health practices. The training lasted for eight (8) weeks after which the women entered an eight (8) week internship followed by six (6) months of job placement support.
Moving Forward: Safe guarding measures such as childcare and travel stipends can be vital to youth participation, especially if the young people are from disadvantaged backgrounds.
One of the factors that led to the success of the Ninaweza project is that prior to the training and to ensure that the technical training responds to the market demands, the project implementing organization conducted a study to assess the needs of the local industry. This meant that the training was developed with full knowledge of the training gap to be addressed. This is an important lesson and a core area of learning and replicability. As part of the replicability mechanisms, it is important that counselling is integrated in the life skills training to improve the attitudes of the beneficiaries towards work. It is also important that mechanisms be put in place to remove the culture of invulnerability so as to reduce crave for handouts. Replicating organizations should also consider increasing the duration of training so that the young women can spend more time on their training before transiting them to an internship. Also, life skills training might have provided advantages that helped participants to obtain more desirable jobs.
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