By Kelvin M. Wright | Program Manager
Our Employment Accelerator program is a platform in SMART Liberia’s Changemakers Village that creates a local workforce for the emerging Liberian economy. This program resulted from a survey we conducted with a selected group of local companies through which we found that these companies are reluctant to hire local graduates because they generally lack computer literacy, and the ability to use productivity tools such as Google Suite and MS Office, etc. As such, through tailored training in Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Computer literacy, and exposure to productivity tools such as Google Suite, Asana, Slack, etc, we are developing a pipeline of young people who have the technical, social, and critical thinking skills for a changing local/global economy. After the two-month intensive training, fellows are matched up with job opportunities through our online jobs portal.
Our first cohort completed the two months training and were placed into internships at various institutions that we are partnering with. As part of the program curriculum and a means of evaluating our fellows’ performances at their various places of internships, we sent assessment forms to their different supervisors. The results from the intern assessment forms were impressive; supervisors were satisfied with the interns’ performances. Due to this, five students got internship extension and three received employment. This measures the impact our GlobalGiving donors are helping us create in Liberia.
The program graduated its inaugural cohort of sixteen students on January 11, 2020. During the event, four students were also certificated for successfully completing a crash course in Introduction to Microsoft office & Google Suite. All the fellows are currently working and oozing out the professional and leadership skills learned during the training. Upon the graduation of cohort one, we commenced recruitment for Cohort two, our second batch of beneficiaries. At the end of the process, we sent out admittance emails to eighteen applicants. The selection was straightly merit-based. We effectively started classes on February 24, 2020 with seven students present. Our students have gone almost two weeks of training. Meanwhile, the creation of our job portal which will match Liberians especially our fellows to jobs is in progress. We have come this far in our journey of transforming Liberia through our Employment Accelerator Program because of the support we get from our donors. You are fueling our energy and making what we visualize for Liberia a reality. We are grateful for your support and your effort to ensure that the World becomes better. Together, we can change the World with time.
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