Economic Growth Kenya Project #68620

Equip entrepreneurship skills to 100 youth Kenya

by Jabulani Youths for Transformation

Project Report | Oct 22, 2026
Creating Opportunities for Young People

By Jesse Odippo | Communications Consultant

KaaKazini service providers

We remain grateful for your contribution in helping us to turn our mission of equipping 100 young people with entrepreneurship skills into reality. Your support is what keeps us going, and the belief that we are making a difference is what motivates us to stay on this path.

In this quarter, JAY4T continued to develop practical pathways to youth employment, entrepreneurship, and sustainable livelihoods. Our work is to transform the talents, skills, and knowledge of young people into opportunities for them to build their futures.

Our employment social enterprise, KaaKazini, now has four verified craftsmen on the platform. This includes an artisan based in Mamboleo, Kisumu, who works with different steel products; a local footwear maker; a potter; and movers, connecting skilled service providers with opportunities to showcase their work and reach potential clients. We have also improved the dashboards for clients and craftsmen so that customer service and navigation of the platform are much easier.

Through our grassroots sports platform LigiOpen, two clubs have registered, making progress in our efforts to support grassroots sports and provide local clubs with the opportunity to be part of a more connected sports community. We continued improving how users discover clubs, access fixtures and view standings.

Behind these developments, young people are acquiring practical skills and experience. Samuel’s experience with JAY4T’s LigiOpen platform is one such case. He worked on an existing digital product, investigating its code, finding technical problems, improving features and working with APIs. Throughout the process, he developed his development and problem-solving skills and learned how to collaborate, communicate and adjust to changing requirements.

His experience shows the need to provide young people with opportunities to work on real projects, solve practical problems and develop skills relevant to their future careers. This is the type of hands-on learning JAY4T aims to deliver to young people.

Our volunteer programme was launched on 22nd July, and we welcomed our first international volunteer, Deborah Bosa, from Genoa, Italy. She worked with our team and connected with the communities we serve during her 20-day engagement. We are creating opportunities to share knowledge and collaborate that can help strengthen our work. We expect more volunteers to join.

We also recruited a programme lead to support programme coordination and implementation. In addition, we gathered feedback from young people in our community, which will help shape our priorities for 2027, keeping their needs at the core of our planning.

Help us equip 100 young people with entrepreneurship skills

These milestones are part of a larger goal: equipping 100 young people in Kenya with entrepreneurship skills and helping them access practical opportunities to apply their talents. Achieving this requires continued investment in skills development, mentorship, programme delivery and the social enterprises creating pathways to opportunity.

Your support can help JAY4T expand these efforts, give more young people access to practical learning and strengthen the pathways that connect their abilities to economic opportunities.

Together, we can help more young people turn their skills into sustainable livelihoods.

Thank you for being part of JAY4T’s journey.

First international volunteer

Craft opportunities with Lutheran School

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Jun 23, 2026
183 youth now on the entrepreneurship journey

By Jesse Odippo | Communications Officer

Dear Friend,

Thank you for continuing to support our work to equip young people in Kenya with entrepreneurship skills and pathways to dignified work. Over the past three months, your support has helped us move from planning into action. Our Youth Entrepreneurship Program (YEP) is now underway, and so far 183 young people have joined the program through a continuous intake model that allows us to support youth at different stages of their journey. We also hosted an Xchange Bazaar in partnership with Milimani United Community Empowerment (MUCE) in Kisumu East, where 23 young people came together to share ideas, build connections, and explore community-based business opportunities. From that session, 7 enterprise ideas emerged, including ideas in waste management, agriculture, micro-manufacturing, equipment access, housing, and digital services.

One of the young people we met during the Xchange Bazaar was Vallary, a young woman with talent and ambition but limited opportunities and outlets to turn her skills into something meaningful. Like many young people in our communities, she had the drive to do more but lacked the right platform, network, and support system. Through the exchange, Vallary was able to connect with other young people and begin exploring how her skills could contribute to an events collective enterprise for performing artists or even grow into something of her own. For us, this is what the work is about: helping young people move from having untapped potential to finding real pathways for collaboration, contribution, and enterprise creation. We also encouraged youth who are still exploring their path to plug into our existing employment social enterprises, KaaKazini, LigiOpen, and Sote Tule, where they can learn, contribute, and potentially help grow solutions that are already taking shape.

This quarter also brought important progress in strengthening the foundation around the program. We received our first external donation of KES 20,000 through a CSR partner, helping us successfully run the Xchange Bazaar. We connected internet to our JAY4T office and began improving it as a creative and co-working space for young people and our enterprises. Across our social enterprises, LigiOpen is now available on the Play Store and has begun outreach to local football clubs in Kisumu; KaaKazini has onboarded its first tradesperson, a handmade footwear maker; and Sote Tule continues to refine its farming model and tools for community coordination. We have also hired an Operations and Finance Lead to strengthen our internal systems as we continue growing. Thank you for making this progress possible!

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Feb 23, 2026
Continuing with an entrepreneurial momentum

By Jesse Odippo | Communications Officer

We remain grateful for your continued support in driving us closer to our goal of equipping entrepreneurship skills to 100 youth in Kenya. As we receive, we continue to better our programs and strengthen our systems to serve the youth better as we work with them.

JAY4T recently had a LabStorm hosted by Feedback Labs, Listening for Livelihoods, which explored how youth feedback can move beyond data collection to real ownership. We were challenged to co-design with youth, treating feedback as a tool for accountability, skill-building, and systems improvement. The insights from the LabStorm are now shaping how youth voices influence program design and evaluation at JAY4T.

In line with that, JAY4T is launching the Youth Entrepreneurship program (YEP), which is an accelerator for the three employment social enterprises: Kaakazini, LigiOpen, and Sotetule. The program will run for 6 months, following a cohort-based approach to create a steady pipeline of beneficiaries, with the first cohort starting in March 2026. YEP is open to youth from Kisumu and beyond who are passionate about entrepreneurship, digital innovation, sports, agriculture, and community solutions, and who want to be part of founding teams of new enterprises.

The program will offer modules in areas such as enterprise creation and business model design, asset-based community development research, digital skills and technical workstreams, professional mentorship and many more.

In partnership with the Lutheran Technical Training Institute in Mamboleo, Kisumu, JAY4T was able to acquire an office, which will host the YEP cohort and be the official registered office the organisation will use to facilitate the YEP program – a home for the cohort! JAY4T has also secured partnership with three youth-serving community based organizations to leverage collaboration and extend reach of impact. Our partner CBOs include Kisumu Progressive Youth, Milimani United Community Engagement and Generation Impact Alliance (KGIA). We also recently partnered with Change the Game Academy for our team to learn fundraising and organizational effectiveness through the online courses offered, as we continue strengthening our operations. These collaborations enable us to have a smooth running of the program, as we work together with the institutions.

We continue to actively seek support as we prepare to kickstart our first program in March. Your support is what keeps us going.

One empowered youth brings us closer to an empowered generation.

JAY4T's meeting with Milimani United Community

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