Pad-Up Creations

The Problem

According to the National Bureau of Statistics, at least two-thirds of unemployed youth are between 15 and 24 years of age and more than 50 percent of unemployed youth between 2008 and 2012 are female. Also, youth unemployment is mostly in rural areas and rapidly growing from 47.59 percent to 59.95 percent.

For over 4 years, we have employed youth and women, especially those in the rural and low-income communities, giving them hope. About 99.1% of them can now speak and write in English. They earn salaries to support their families, especially in payment of school fees which was their basic challenge before they joined us.

42% of our job creation will focus on youth with more focus on women, between the ages of 18-35 living in the rural and low-income communities, who have limited income, may not have more than secondary school education, but are willing to work.

The Solution

Success through empowerment project “STEP” is needed now considering the increasing inflation rate in Nigeria, which reduces the purchasing power of the citizens and pushes down the poverty line. The project will be focusing on the production and distribution of washable/reusable sanitary pads and will consider hard-to-employ people within the society.

The project is designed to solve:

• Employment inequalities: people at the lower educational pyramid do not get consideration from employers, and the same applies to women because employers do not want to grant different maternity leave or child care leave. These force women not to apply for jobs and makes the employed ones quit jobs when they get married.
• Skill gap: A lot of youth lack the necessary skills to function well in a formal setting, etc.

Some of the barriers that prevent the solution:

• Some people at the lower educational pyramid feel shy to even look for jobs because they feel they are not qualified.
• Some employers place high criteria and demand several years’ experience, making it difficult for them to meet up
• The number of qualified unemployed is so many that little attention is given to the unqualified.

Additionality 

Pad-Up Creations Limited requires 288,000 grants from the CFYE to enable us to expand our market, improve on our distribution channels and increase our production capacity. This will give us an opportunity to create more jobs and improve the working condition of the existing staff while empowering more women.

We can execute this project on a lower scale without the CFYE funding but may not fully reach that same number of impacts, because of inadequate funding. The company usually bootstraps to execute all projects, including the acquisition of facilities and machines because of the difficulty in assessing funding in the country.

The CFYE support will help us produce our adverts and promotional items in order to create more visibility and increase sales, staff, and goodwill. We will also set up sales hubs that will make the products more assessable to people when we create that visibility.