What’s New?
The Tanzania Youth Economic Empowerment (YEE) Activity is currently in start-up as it as it works in parallel to establish operations in three provinces in Tanzania, as well as building the foundation for the activity's work with partners, local communities, and youth. This includes:
- Establishing YEE's headquarters in Iringa, Tanzania
- Undertaking a Youth and Gender Assessment to better understand the barriers to employment young people face and the assets they have
Prime Implementer
DAI
Implementing Partners
- Khanga Rue Media
- Pathfinder
- SNV
Activity Timeline
August 2017 – August 2019
Activity Goals
The activity aims to engage youth as a driving force for growth in rural economies of Tanzania by focusing on developing and delivering training and mentoring focusing on three ‘L’s – Life skills, Livelihoods, and Leadership – which are designed to offer youth choice and to facilitate their journey along a pathway to richer, fuller, healthier and productive lives. This approach capitalizes upon youth’s passion, energy, and can-do attitude, channeling these elements as well as latent leadership skills and advocacy to give youth voice, vision, and tangible skills so they may participate effectively in the economic development of Tanzania through accountable leadership, gainful employment and/or entrepreneurship.
The YEE activity is working to achieve three overarching Intermediate Results:
- Increasing youth’s entrepreneurship and workforce-readiness skills
- Strengthening youth leadership and positive community engagement
- Enhancing young people’s life skills Life for healthy living
Brief Background
USAID’s Youth Economic Empowerment (YEE) Task Order (TO) seeks to leverage USAID/Tanzania’s investments in employment, education, agriculture, governance and health into one youth-centered program that builds the capacities of young people ages 15-35. The YEE activity will engage young people by using Positive Youth Development approaches to empower rural Tanzanian youth. It will connect them to viable business and employment options for rural economies, highlighting the income-generating potential across agricultural and other rural value chains, and facilitating access to information, skills, and opportunities to ensure their success in business start-ups and sustained employment. The YEE activity is both market- and demand-driven, connecting youth with opportunity while providing them the life skills, future goals, an entrepreneurial mindset, and basic job seeking capabilities in skill areas sought by private sector employers.
Overview of Activities
The following are YEE’s cross-cutting core activities for the first year. These will establish key systems, processes, partnerships, or relationships that enable activities and results throughout the activity.
- Establish Youth Leadership Council
- Conduct and analyze Youth and Gender Assessment
- Establish Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) with Government and Private Sector
- Conduct and analyze Labor Market and Value Chain Assessment
- Conduct and analyze Digital Insights Survey
- Customize M-Health Digital Referral System to the YEE Activity
- Institute Competitive Grants Under Contracts Award Process
- Develop the YEE Activity Content for Digital Media
Expected Results/Impact
The YEE activity is organized into three Intermediate Results:
- The heart of the YEE activity is increasing youth’s entrepreneurship and workforce-readiness skills. This is the economic and livelihoods component of YEE, and its key outcomes are workforce, enterprise, and (economic) leadership development. Led by partner SNV, our approach is founded on adapting and scaling up their successful approach tested under the MasterCard Foundation-funded Opportunities for Youth Employment (OYE) project. Informed by the Labor Market, Value Chain, and Youth and Gender Assessments, the YEE activity will provide targeted training and on-going mentorship to youth, connecting them with specific job and business opportunities.
- The second result focuses on engaging youth in their communities and cultivating a cadre of youth leaders capable of providing thought leadership and championing change in their communities, regionally, and nationally. The YEE activity will first identify these leaders and assess their knowledge, aptitudes and skills. Then, the activity will discern their priorities for action and engagement to finally develop a curriculum designed to fill the gaps necessary to effectively plan and implement advocacy campaigns and tangible actions designed to solution the youth identified priorities. The aim is to build youth capacity to be effective advocates for the inclusion of youth priorities and ensure they are integrated at critical development decision making bodies during and beyond the life of the activity.
- Life skills training will be the entry point for many of the YEE activity youth beneficiaries. The YEE approach to life skills for healthy living and future planning will be values-based, asking youth to first examine what is important to them, what are their hopes and dreams for the future, and charting out a course that might take them there. This exploration process will help to segment the group by interest and affinity and inform referrals to other the YEE activity components and other personal development programs.