The Youth Forward initiative aims to improve the capacity of hundreds of thousands of young women and men in Ghana and Uganda to get jobs, grow their businesses and access finance to expand the opportunities available to them. This programme is in partnership with The MasterCard Foundation and implemented by four consortia comprising 28 organisations in the agriculture and construction sectors, across eight Ghanaian regions and twelve Ugandan districts.
In Ghana, two programmes are to be implemented under the Youth Forward Initiative:
- Youth Inclusive Entrepreneurial Development Initiative for Employment (YIEDIE) Program. The YIEDIE consortium is led by Global Communities, Ghana.
- The Next Generation Cocoa Youth Programme (NGCYP). The Next Generation Consortium is led by Solidaridad West Africa.
The Youth Forward Learning Partnership is led by the Research and Policy in Development (RAPID) programme at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), in partnership with Participatory Development Associates (PDA) in Ghana and Development Research Training (DRT) in Uganda. The Learning Partnership works across the programme to develop an evidence-based understanding of the needs of young people in Ghana and Uganda and how the programme can best meet those needs. This is done through three complementary activity streams:
Knowledge Development: through programme-wide evaluation; sector, context and policy analyses; and applied research on youth perceptions of agriculture and financial behaviour.
Facilitates Knowledge sharing: across the Youth Forward initiative through annual meetings, cross-programme learning exchanges and an online-learning platform; and beyond the Youth Forward programme through conferences, policy briefs and reports.
Fostering multi-sector dialogue:
the Learning Partner convenes National Advisory Groups in Ghana and Uganda to facilitate multi-sector dialogue and learning.