The project will give Wisdom a viable business, a steady income and employ 4 youth interns in the short term. He will earn enough to acquire land, start his own farm, employ other unemployed youth and rent rooms for himself. The project will create jobs and encourage more youth to go into farming. It will enhance Totally Youth's capacity to support more youth incubators. In the long term, it can create thousands of jobs for unemployed youth and train youth to accept farming as a worthwhile job
Wisdom is a Soil/Lab Technician who has been in and out of jobs due to lay-offs and recruitment caps. He wants to start a farm to earn income and get out of poverty but has no skills, no money, accommodation or farm land. He cannot pay for daily return fares, meals and boarding and he has no collateral for loans from banks/financial entities. Without requisite support, Wisdom will be one of over 358,000 unemployed poor, depressed and homeless youth with no future, looking for non-existent jobs.
Wisdom gets free accommodation and free access to our Backyard, Office and ICT Centers, to start a vegetable farm. He is mentored and trained in various aspects of farming as a business. Wisdom has laid out his farm beds and applied organic fertilizers to start planting and will earn income towards his farm. One ready-market is our Catering Centre. US$4,000 will help with registration, capacity building, mentoring, equipment, tools, consumables, etc in incubation and farm tools and land after.
It will trigger a domino effect of more unemployed youth going into farming as a worthwhile business and job; Engender enabling policies and support for youth start-ups; Increase confidence of donors to support youth start-ups based on proven success of this project; Enhance our capacity to support more needy youth into business; Facilitate requisite changes in syllabi in tertiary and vocational institutions. Concepts and lessons learned can be adopted by NGOs/Angels to support youth start-ups.
This project has provided additional documentation in a DOCX file (projdoc.docx).
