Deadline: 8-Apr-22
The Challenge Fund for Youth Employment (CFYE) is inviting solutions aimed at two themes: financial service providers (FSPs) and rural areas.
The Call for Solutions aims to work with FSPs or/and social enterprises or/and NGOs in key growth sectors, implementing sustainable solutions for the creation of jobs, improving decency of work, responding to youth aspirations, developing gender sensitivity, and operating under other requirements and compliance with the labour laws of Burkina Faso.
The objective is to impact decent jobs for the country’s youth, especially women, by providing additional financial and technical support to actors working with high-potential SMEs across sectors, notably in rural areas, and with the local network & understanding to successfully lead projects.
The goal of the Challenge Fund for Youth Employment is to support robust and innovative ideas for creating or improving decent work prospects for youth, especially young women. For this program, youth is defined as between the ages of 15 – 35.
Principles
- Actively targeting women
- The Role of Private Sector
- Additionality
- Youth Engagement
- Taking an integrated approach leading to jobs
- Sustainability (long term prospects)
The Challenge
- Burkina Faso, a country of 22m, is one of the world’s poorest countries with a GDP of $14bn, an extreme poverty rate of 40%, and a Human Development Index (HDI) that ranks 182/189.
- While there has been a significant push by the international community and the government to reduce poverty and develop the economy, the country’s multiple challenges have meant that growth has remained too low to improve living standards.
- Burkina Faso also has a very dynamic demographic growth and a young population.
- The median age is 18 years, and 64% of the population is younger than 25. In recent years, the working-age population has been growing by an average of 0.6m annually, with nowhere near enough new jobs created every year to provide them with jobs.
- The youth is increasingly moving towards urban centers, with 31% of the population living in cities.
Funding Information
- The minimum contribution of the fund is €50,000.
Eligibility Criteria
- Please note that the fund is somewhat flexible regarding the application of these criteria, as the main issue is to engage with partners that have decent experience in operating projects and investing in activities that generate a decent number of jobs for young people.
- Interested organizations, projects, and enterprises are invited to connect to CFYE. During a discussion, they will clarify if your project is eligible for funding or how it can be adapted to become more interesting for a partnership.
- Operational Criteria:
- The lead applicant, or at least one of the consortium partners, must have a local operating presence in the country or prove activities in the country in the past five years.
- Selected applicants must begin project activities for the CFYE co-funded initiative by October 2022.
Competitive Process
- The Challenge Fund for Youth Employment will apply a competitive process to select the projects that will receive a grant.
- That means that only those projects that present a clear and convincing pathway to employment, lead to significant and sustainable results in terms of decent employment for youth, with a focus on young women, and can demonstrate high leverage will be selected.
For more information, visit https://fundforyouthemployment.nl/call-for-solutions-burkina-faso/