Youth Entrepreneurship Facility's Youth-to-Youth Fund

The Youth Entrepreneurship Facility (YEF) enables African Youth to turn their energy and ideas into business opportunities to increase their income and create decent work for themselves and others. It is an initiative by the Africa Commission, implemented by the Youth Employment Network (YEN), and the International Labour Organization (ILO).
The Facility’s mission is to contribute to job creation in East Africa through youth entrepreneurship development. The five components aim to i) foster a culture of entrepreneurship among young people, ii) introduce entrepreneurship education in schools, iii) ensure that potential and existing young entrepreneurs have access to business development services and finance, iv) provide opportunities for youth to actively engage in employment generating projects through a youth-to-youth fund, and v) promote evidence-based advocacy to better understand what works in youth entrepreneurship development.

Main objective
The Youth-to-Youth Fund component of the Facility offers local youth-led organizations an opportunity to actively participate in the development of youth entrepreneurship in their communities.  It supports small-scale youth entrepreneurship development projects implemented by youth-led organizations.

The Youth-to-Youth Fund was created as a mechanism to identify, test and promote innovative entrepreneurship solutions to youth employment challenges.

This goal is accomplished through a competitive grant scheme for youth-led organizations to propose innovative project ideas on how to create entrepreneurship and business opportunities for their peers. The organizations with the most innovative project ideas receive a grant and complementary capacity building to help them implement their projects and test the viability of their ideas. The scheme is implemented simultaneously in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.