She Leads Africa

The Problem

Youth unemployment is a problem of our times. More than half of the youth (53%) in Nigeria between the ages of 18 and 35 is either unemployed or underemployed (24,5 million). Young people face many difficulties securing decent employment. As an addition, many youths that graduate lack the necessary skills that are demanded by the labour force, as a result most of them are unemployed after graduation.

Women are disproportionally affected by unemployment, there is a gap of over 5% between men and women. The reason for this is often early family formation and low enrolment in schools. This imbalance can mean that more women are excluded from opportunities that make them self-reliant.

Additionally, about 6 in 10 people live below the national poverty line according to the World Bank. This highlights an urgent need for a fresh approach to tackling unemployment.

The Solution

With our project, SLA Level Up Program, we focus on employment and entrepreneurship. The program aims to help graduates and entrepreneurs to level up their employability skills and business processes respectively.

With the help of CFYE, our project offers two pathways:

• The entrepreneurship pathway, in which we will focus on training entrepreneurs to improve their business processes as well as providing them access to investment opportunities.
• The graduate pathway, which will take a thousand unemployed or underemployed youths through a mindset, soft skills and basic technical skills training to prepare them for the labour market and to put them through a direct job matching process with partner organisations. We aim to get at least 60% of the number of trained youth to be employed after four months of the program.

In the long term we will be creating 100 employment opportunities, matching 700 employment opportunities and improving 200 jobs for young, Nigerian women.

Additionality 

It is likely that with CFYE support, the project will be better designed, proceed more quickly, or reach more young people than it otherwise would have.

The CFYE support will allow us to significantly scale up on our proven and tested programs to improve the economic prospects and career aspirations of young women in Nigeria. Also, the CFYE funding will enable us  to impact about 1000 young women in two years, and the funding and technical support will also help us set up the program to keep reaching more people even after CFYE funding has stopped.