By Clara Chow | CEO
Happy summer, Global Giving family! Have we got an impact report for you. We hope you enjoy it by a pool somewhere, accompanied by thoughtful sips of some cool drink. Like that pool you’re sitting next to, your impact this summer has been both wide and deep:
Depth: 100 career paths to be launched at Zest, our first skills-building SME (small or medium enterprise)
Zest is the first business to make the leap from GEN’s microenterprise incubator to its growth portfolio, professionally managed and designed by GEN to “kill the dead end job” for 50-100+ low-income, low-skilled youth who would otherwise be trapped in informal sector work.
At this point, we’re onboarding 1-2 new cleaning crews per quarter, and training them up to international hospitality standards. By 2017 we will have created over 100 jobs – not precarious informal sector odd jobs or contractor roles with no benefits, but real jobs. Real career paths. And real opportunities to work up to equity ownership, so youth own a piece of the value they helped create.
By joining Zest, these youth are entering a “work/study” program in which they’ll learn skills on the job while earning a living wage. They will each receive a personalized “career map” that tracks their skills and experiences as they follow a career path from trainee to cleaning crew member to cleaning crew supervisor to account manager to franchise owner. Each step will unlock new skills training, expanded responsibilities, and more attractive pay and benefits.
GEN’s Zest will be a formal sector business that will meet real market demand. It’s important for this business to be healthy, because the plan is to turn over the reins to the workers once it’s steadily profitable. Think of GEN as training wheels helping to scale this youth-run business. In a couple years, the training wheels come off, the youth workers become youth owners as well. GEN will launch a new business in another community. The Zest youth will ride off into the sunset, creating sustainable jobs and skills that transform the life chances for those in their community.
Width: 1000 youth-run businesses to be funded through Ignite Ideas
We hope you’re feeling excited about Zest’s potential and our plans. And wait till you hear more about our “Home Depot” concept, BuildShop, and a number of other food, beauty, and service ideas we’re watching as they go through training and test phase in our Ignite Ideas program.
With Ignite, we have partnered with the workforce training org Afterschool Graduate Development Center to train 1000 youth and disburse N100 million to microenterprises, all on behalf of the Lagos State Government.
Through Ignite, we are training and testing business concepts at scale, and we may set up a physical incubator/workspace for the most promising businesses. This whole process serves the purpose of effectively surfacing businesses that can be the next Zest.
Whew! What a lot of work you and your donations have done. Your $30K in gifts of $50 increments unlocked about $0.5M in startup funding for youth-run businesses in Africa’s largest megacity.
You definitely deserve a nice summer vacation. Enjoy, and we’ll catch up with you again in the fall.
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