La Fabrique

The Problem

In order to address unemployment among young people and women in Burkina Faso, efficient and responsible SMEs must be developed to create decent and sustainable jobs for these two groups.

However, SMEs face increasingly complex challenges. This primarily involves difficulty in mobilizing relevant expertise as scaling up companies requires the utilization of specific knowledge in technical topics. Unfortunately, the education system does not adequately prepare young candidates for the job market’s practicalities, resulting in a skills gap between themselves and employers. There is also a lack of professional internship opportunities available to students or young graduates, which in turn increases the skills gap in the young workforce.

The Solution

In order to address these challenges, we are launching the first acceleration program entirely dedicated to impacting businesses to demonstrate that it is possible to create new economic models, and new ways of producing, exchanging and consuming. These companies are gradually gaining a foothold in national markets, and our project aims to accelerate this trend.

We propose to enable 10 high-impact companies to grow and maximize their impact. In doing so, we will benefit young people and women by:

• Raising awareness and support for new entrepreneurs: We will offer training, exchanges, and individualized coaching sessions to suit the needs of identified entrepreneurs and the evolution of their organizations.
• Creation of new jobs: We will organize 2 recruitment forums allowing the 10 companies to identify their future employees, in partnership with recruitment professionals (ICI, RMO Job Center, Talent 2 Africa , etc.). Furthermore, these events will allow young people to consider their career development in meaningful companies.
• Collaboration with academic institutions: We will continue to forge partnerships with higher business or management schools to allow young students to have practical experience within impact companies. The students, made up of 10 groups of 5, will be able to work for 8 to 12 weeks on a specific problem encountered by a company, in connection with their field of study, and under the supervision of a professional from La Fabrique. In a context in which professional internships are extremely rare, we give the opportunity to 50 young people per year to have a very concrete first experience in the business.
• Sustainability and improvement of jobs already created within the 10 companies:  Scaling up these companies can only be done by integrating in-depth research on the organization of human resources, the creation of strong corporate cultures and the creation of career plans within companies.

Our support will also have a considerable indirect effect. With more than 50% of the companies, we work with being agri-food companies, hundreds of agricultural producers will be given special attention in order to strengthen fair and inclusive trade approaches.