BRAC International’s Youth Empowerment Programme empowers adolescents to fight existing social and economic oppression by showing them the pathways to deal with obstacles and realise their full potential.
Rabia Aziz, a secondary school student in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, was unable to continue her education because her family could not pay the school fees. Now 18, she helps her mother run a small business selling chili sauce.
On joining a ELA (Empowerment and Livelihood for Adolescents) club set up by BRAC Tanzania’s “Goal” project under the Youth Empowerment Programme, Rabia gained access to entrepreneurship and employability skills training and learned how to run a business.
She is now able to expand her mother’s business from selling six bottles a day to 20 bottles a day. She learned ways to market and sell products, keep records, and is also able to calculate profit and loss statements.
“Previously I blamed myself for the business not doing well, but now I am very well equipped to grow this business and also be able to start another one,” shared Rabia.
BRAC International’s Youth Empowerment Programme works towards empowering adolescent girls and young women, enabling them to fight existing social and economic oppression by showing them the pathways to deal with those obstacles to realise their full potential. These include strengthening the reproductive health and livelihoods of young women, including those with disabilities, through safe spaces known as ELA clubs.
The Youth Empowerment programme operates in five countries in Asia and Africa–Nepal, Tanzania, Uganda, Liberia and Sierra Leone–reaching 39,339 people in 2020.
Through the Youth Empowerment programme in Nepal in 2020, 94 young women were trained as electrical technicians, with 56% of them now engaged as electricians in their communities. In Sierra Leone, life-skills story books were translated into audio recordings and aired on the Ministry of Education’s daily radio shows.
