Cameroon Forum Foundation seeks to provide seed enterprise skills, seed capital and mentoring to 10 urban youth comprising university graduates and street hawkers, giving them an opportunity to better themselves, and become agents of change within society. There is a 75% graduate unemployment rate, and these, including street hawkers are prone to insecurity, trafficking and illegal migration.
There is a 75% graduate unemployment rate in Cameroon. These graduates coupled with street hawkers form the unemployed urban youth. 60% of the Cameroon population are youth between 18 to 35 years old. Some of these have innate entrepreneurial skills which they can put to benefited use with the correct capacity-building programme. As unemployed, they are disenfranchised and are prone to insecurity, trafficking and illegal migration.
The project will provide enterprise training, mentoring, registration, and business seed capital that will change the condition of the selected youth from unemployed to a business owner, and net contributor to the local economy by paying taxes, and creating further job opportunities.
This pilot project will provide quite detailed close contact training to 10 urban youth, who will become role models to others, their families and community. They will have made use of their intrinsic skills to create income streams for themselves, gain financial literacy and more knowledge about local economic planning. The program will be scaled to other urban areas.
