RESEARCH
This is a Capacity building program aimed to empower youth with hard and soft skills in various disciplines, and is at the heart of Ujana Afrika’s tangible outcomes. This involves short term re-skilling and up-skilling programs as well as capacity building youth leaders to drive change in a more impactful manner.
Our Empowerment Programs
UJANA’s flagship project, “Road to 1000 Skilled girls” has an ambitious goal to enrol 1000 girls in technical training institutions, across a five year strategy from the year 2021. This will promote female participation in TVET as evidence based data shows there is low enrolment nationwide
UJANA will provide short term re-skilling and up-skilling training opportunities to marginalised youth groups so that they can gain relevant skills to earn dignified livelihoods from. Disciplines in this program will be in key sectors that drive economic growth such as Agriculture – Value Addition, Agribusiness & Agriculture Machinery technology; Infrastructure – Building & Construction Technology; Hospitality- Cosmetology and Beauty Therapy, among others. The re- skilling agenda focuses on training youth in these sector-related skills to advance their entrepreneurship and self-employment opportunities; as well as equip them with innovative skills to modernise these sectors which are the backbone of economies in Kenya and Sub-Saharan nations.
UJANA works at county level with a bottom-up approach to empower and engage with the youth at grassroots level. This is focused on building capacity of youth leaders to form County youth technical groups that will advocate for TVET and youth pursuing technical courses at the vocational training centers (former Youth Polytechnics). Lastly, increasing youth engagement by galvanizing collaboration with existing Community Based Organizations (CBOs) to increase youth engagement on lobbying for development of county based policies and thus sharing power between the leaders “adults” and youth.
The UJANA Innovation program aims at providing a pipeline of innovative youth to various incubation opportunities for them to access further training. Through our partners, these incubator programs aims at growing their ideas to potential innovative solutions for existing problems in various sectors. The program identifies, supports and invests in young entrepreneurs through every stage of innovation, helping them move from initial concepts, through testing and demonstration to achieve commercial scale.