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Cape Town - The Coca-Cola Africa Foundation (TCCAF) has pledged $4.5m towards a new youth empowerment initiative that will provide life skills training, business skills training and access to employment and mentoring for 25 000 young Africans.
The company announced this at the World Economic Forum on Thursday.
The Youth Empowered for Success (YES!) program will empower marginalised youth in six African countries and will leverage technology and strategic partnerships to accelerate and scale the initiative to provide opportunities to many more youth across the continent.
The YES! initiative will be introduced in Kenya, Tunisia and South Africa in phase one before being implemented in Liberia, Nigeria and Uganda through TCCAF and implementing partners Mercy Corps, Microsoft, Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator and Kuza Biashara.
During the first three years TCCAF aims to provide proof of concept for a scalable and replicable model with the ambition to reach 500 000 youth by 2020 by establishing strong partnerships with private sector, NGO, government and civil society organisations.
“Harnessing the incredible energy and ambition of a young and growing population will be critical to Africa’s future economic advancement,” said Nathan Kalumbu, chair of the Coca Cola Africa Foundation.
“Over 10 to 12 million young Africans are entering the workforce each year, yet less than half this number of employment opportunities are currently available."
Currently 40 million African youth are out of work, and young Africans continue to enter the workforce at a faster rate than jobs are created, according to Neal Keny-Guyer, CEO of Mercy Corps.
Louis Otieno, director, legal and corporate affairs at the Microsoft 4Afrika Initiative, said Microsoft is proud to be a partner of the YES! initiative through its employment and entrepreneurship platform.
"This is an exciting program that will not only have a significant impact locally on skills development for the workforce but support technology based start-ups that are developing solutions for local challenges,” he said.
