Strategy and approach
- Building entrepreneurship through linkages with financing institutions and Funds – Funds for Youth YES Kenya works to create markets and unleash entrepreneurship in the country by helping young people to identify business opportunities, prepare their business plans and compete for the best ideas. The fund supports young entrepreneurs to participate in the Business Plan competitions, which rewards winners with small-scale risk capital, start-up funding, credit and loan guarantees, and innovative business development services to start their businesses.
- Building the capacity of the YES Country Networks as a means to generate an in-country infrastructure of youth-led networks to disseminate information, develop programmes, advocate innovative policies, and implement projects that promote youth employment and leadership. Currently there are YES Country Networks in all the 47 Counties at various stages of development. They will be given technical support through an Academy for Youth Social Entrepreneurship that will provide them with leadership and entrepreneurship training.
- Organizing the Youth Employment Summits as means to continue to hold and maintain a focus on the issue of youth unemployment on the global agenda. Summits have been held in Egypt 2002, Mexico 2004, Kenya 2006, 2008 in Azerbaijan, YES Rework the World Sweden in 2010. At these summits the youth delegates meet with experts, donors, practitioners and other stakeholders to develop programmes and policies that will help build in- country capacity to provide the education, training and other services needed by young people to find productive work.
- Academy for Youth Social Entrepreneurship, based at Cambridge College (Massachusetts), it is an international centre for engaging and inspiring young people to ‘be the change they want to see’. It takes the lessons learnt and the pathways unfolding through the work of the YES Campaign over the last 18 years, to become a leading programme for building the capacity of young people to be change agents. It aims to become a source for innovative and creative solutions for action in the social sector. All of the programmes offered have a theoretical and a project based approach to learning.
PURPOSE
The Youth Employment Summit Kenya brings together different stakeholders and works with them to (1) develop the capacity of youth to lead employment initiatives; (2) promote youth employment to address key development challenges; and (3) build in-country coalitions to develop national strategies addressing youth unemployment. It focuses on building self-sustaining youth-led Country Networks. These are youth-centred national coalitions, focusing on promoting youth employment and bringing together youth organizations with NGOs, the private sector, academic and training institutions and governments. Together they develop programmes and policies that provide young people with skills, qualifications and possibilities for productive work.
