African Development Fund helps create thousands of jobs for young people in Malawi | African Development Bank

Thousands of young people in Malawi have found work and some have even created jobs for their peers, thanks to a project supported by the African Development Bank.

The Jobs for Youth project in Malawi, which was implemented between 2017 and 2022, has helped develop an entrepreneurial culture among young people from primary school to university, according to the project completion report released by the bank on January 24, 2023.

The African Development Fund, the concessional lender of the African Development Bank Group, had provided Malawi with a loan of $10.45 million and a grant of $1.73 million for the implementation of the project. The aim was to improve the employability of the country’s young people — women and men — by providing them with decent work and thus promoting their economic empowerment. It was also intended to help them develop sustainable entrepreneurship. The Project Jobs for Youth in Malawi focused on both training and technical assistance to training institutions. In addition, the initiative helped provide practical training to extracurricular young people and set up an internship program for young people.

At the end of the project, a total of 14,933 young people were employed. Some of them created jobs for others and offered internships and vocational training through the business incubation program in specific sectors such as manufacturing, information and communication technology, agriculture and small-scale mining. These training programs have resulted in the creation of 5,276 companies. A B2B trade facilitation training program was conducted for 110 young people, 30 young people signed business deals to supply horticulture and other agricultural products to major supermarkets and other agro products buyers.

According to the African Development Bank report, project funds, including vocational training in entrepreneurship, were reallocated to the construction of four technical colleges for training in the selected sectors: mining, manufacturing, ICT and agriculture. The construction of technical colleges in Ngara, Mbandira, Neno and Naminjiwa has been completed. Furniture and equipment have been installed and the colleges are now operational. At the time of the completion of the project, two of the four colleges had already enrolled a total of 225 young people, 114 young people in the clothing sector and 111 in agriculture.