Support 5000 young graduates to be self-employed

Through the generous support of our dnors over the years, our programme "SUPPORT 5000 YOUNG GRADUATES TO BE SELF-EMPLOYED" has impacted thousands of unemployed as well as employed youth, through our six flagship programmes, youth workshops, seminars and conferences. We have also reached millions of youth through television appearances and radio programmes. Our only limitation in our drive to support unemployed youth, is our growing need for funds at the right time. But, together we have achieved a lot since 2011 and we are grateful.

With your support, our Catering Centre was completed this year and have seen two alumni Urica and Seth. Wisdom has finally received a plot of land and is now putting in irrigation pipes and will soon start his own pineaple farm. Summ is able to pay his own rent and have moved out of our premises. Akweley has found an accounting job, Emmanuel has found a teaching job, Akosua is working with a big telecom company, Tina is in public service and is persuing a Master's degree. Felix has his own fashion line in New York, and the list goes on.

We have currently added a new programme called Business Facilitation which supports struggling youth businesses. Totally Youth provides them access to its Knowledge Space, Event Space, Office Space and ICT Centre, to save these businesses the costs associated with renting such facilities at exhobitant recurrent costs. With our facilitation, these youn busnesses build up their capital to become self-reliant. So far we have two such businesses enrolling with us. They will join us in November 2014.

Our "Why Are You Here" seminar series and "Steping Stone to Employment" (education,career, business) are yielding positive results. We intend to market both of them intensively next year, to increase revenue generation. The feedback to date has been very encouraging and we will capitalize on that.

We have come up with two new concepts - "Catching Them Young" and "Going to the Source". Under "catching them young", we will adopt a primary school and have the pupils learn the best way possible so that they will be career and business focused. With regard to "going to the source", we will adopt homes with youth and support them with resources for learning and capacity building. We will share these projects with you once their project documents have been completed. We believe that these two new approaches together with the existing ones, will help solve the unemployment crisis from bottom up, top down and mid-stream.

Due to the support we received from our donors, we have been able to help so many unemployed youth through our micro projects and smaller programmes. You may want to note however, that all our mini programmes and micro projects fall under our "SUPPORT 5000 YOUNG GRADUATES TO BE SELF-EMPLOYED" programme. We are therefore happy to note that donors contributed substantively to our micro projects. We believe that it is easier to relate to individuals and small groups of people and understand their plight better, than to envisage the needs of 5000 youth at a go. We are therefore preparing to request approval from GlobalGiving, to retire our main programme - "SUPPORT 5000 YOUNG GRADUATES TO BE SELF-EMPLOYED" and replace it with "STOP YOUTH POVERTY - YOUTH CREATING JOBS FOR YOUTH". We trust that all our donors - recurrent and non-recurrent, will continue to support Totally Youth through this main programme as well as our micro projects.

We thank all our donors for their benevolent support and we say a special thank you to our recurrent donors who guarantee us regular funding. Together we have made the lives of thousands of unemployed youth hopeful, happy, determined, confident and/or gainfully employed. God bless.

Forever grateful,

Eva Lokko/CEO