YOUTH EMPLOYMENT

'Getting a Job!’ – became a major focus of Peace Child’s work from 2008 onwards. Youth-led Development requires that young people have good jobs in order to deliver good self, and community, development. It also became Peace Child’s major contribution to delivering the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 8 to “achieve full employment for all young women and men by 2030.” A s our research shows, this is likely to be an impossible task – but one in which it is critical that young people invest a whole lot more of their own time in achieving. Between 2008 and 2021, Peace Child co-created a whole series of resources and initiatives to support this work which are free for teachers and students to draw upon and use:

Be The Change and Youth Led Development Books

Introduction

Beginnings

At our Millennium World Youth Congress in 1999, delegates coined the term: “Youth-led Development” – which they defined as development designed and delivered by young people with assistance and guidance, as required, from elder experts. The YLD concept was driven the young people’s desire to be seen as instruments in the delivery of development, not just the beneficiaries of it. It was followed up by the slogan: “See Youth as a Resource, not a Problem” - devised by the Youth Caucus at the Rio+10 Summit in Johannesburg in 2002. Many of the Millennium Action Projects which were designed and delivered by the young delegates at the 1st World Youth Congress involved job creations Youth Unemployment was already a major concern for young people everywhere. Evidence can be seen from many of the examples included in the 2002 Be the Change project Report – and the 2008 “Celebration of Youth-led Development.”

BE THE CHANGE ACADEMIES

BTCA INDIA

Around the time that Celebration of YLD was published, Peace Child Intl. was opening an office in Bangalore which had the specific goal of improving the livelihoods of disadvantaged young people living in slum areas. Jagan Devaraj, who opened that office and ran the Training Programmes, called his office a ‘Be the Change Academy’ (BTCA) – which may be simply defined as a ‘Barefoot Business Academy’ for bottom-of-the-pyramid young people who need to learn basic business skills. The name stuck – and has been replicated by many agencies to advance the idea of peer-to-peer business plan creation training and entry-level development of existing businesses.

Introduction to the 1st Be the Change Academy - Bangalore, India

BTCA KENYA

With Jagan’s encouragement, the BTCA idea was promoted in several funding proposals, and funds were secured to open one in Kisumu, Kenya. Though it encountered management difficulties which led to its early closure, its excellent young directors laid the ground work for empowering youth to train each other in business development planning and execution. Their approach and learnings have informed all subsequent iterations of the BTCA idea. It also delivered over 50 successful youth-led development projects, several of which are still providing employment to this day.

WEST AFRICAN BTCA'S

A fortuitous meeting in Nanjing with the head of youth projects for NORAD, the Norwegian Development Agency, resulted in a grant to set up BTCA's in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone to support disadvantaged young women into employment. Now run with the lightest of light touch supervision, the West African Academies have become successful, locally-owned youth job creation centres for young women, many of whom had no formal education and zero business experience. The Liberia BTCA morphed into UNICEF supported TVET programmes focusing on youth-led business start-ups; the Director of the Guinea BTCA became Guinea’s Minister for Youth and Technology in which position he developed several variations of the BTCA model. The Sierra Leone BTCA, run by Alpha Beretay, is now in its 10th year of operation – and is now run as a separate project by a new charity named Prosper.