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The Youth Café seeks to equip young people with critical media literacy skills: critical thinking, fact-checking, online safety, social media verification, and quality assessment of online information and their sources through a dedicated handbook. This report encapsulates The Process, Findings of the Literature Review, Findings from the Focus Group Discussions and Key Informant Interviews, Conclusions and finally Recommendations.
We welcome the opportunity to develop and refine our Theory of Change as part of organizational Performance Improvement within Youth Excel, a 5-year USAID global flagship youth development program centered on Implementation Research. Our intended outcome is to build a practical theory to underpin our ambitious youth-led community transformation efforts. This Theory of Change is based on organizational performance improvement as an approach to build the capacity of The Youth Café which focuses on achieving our strategies. We recognize that high performing youth-led and youth-serving organizations like we desire to be, need to be exceptional in four domains identified by our Performance Improvement framework: Efficiency, Effectiveness, Relevancy, and Journey to Self-Reliance (J2SR).
This strategy will guide The Youth Cafe in addressing and working to advance youth-led approaches toward achieving sustainable development, social equity, innovative solutions, community resilience, and transformative change. Our plan is ambitious but also appropriate to the scale of the challenge and the opportunity to make a difference. Executing this strategy will require extensive partnerships and new resources. It will require us to sermon our strengths and continue to learn and adapt in order to support the young people we are dedicated to serve and live up to the youth-led principles we embrace.
It is often believed that without opportunity, entrepreneurship would not exist. Identification and pursuit of opportunities are believed to be at the very heart of entrepreneurial success, which sets entrepreneurs apart from other members of society. However, according to the recent Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Report, only about one-third of South Africans were able to recognize entrepreneurial opportunities within their communities. In Uganda, the majority of the youth entrepreneurs are said to be engaged in low margin businesses that are only able to meet the day-to-day needs of the owners with very little differentiation amongst them.
The pandemic and measures taken to curtail its spread have compounded food insecurity on the African continent. Food insecurity challenges were already evident due to previous and ongoing extreme climatic conditions (floods and droughts in southern Africa), pests (locusts in East Africa), civil unrest, slow economic growth, and high levels of unemployment and poverty. This book covers various topics related to agriculture and food security challenges faced by African countries. Africa’s population has been increasing and is estimated to reach 1.2 billion by 2050.
The wheels of international trade are powered by the Internet. From the smallest informal trade to a major supply agreement, contracts are transacted online; whether via email, e-commerce store, or digital platform. Any formal trade relies on the Internet for implementation – financing, documentation, and logistics are all digitally driven, and becoming more and more so. Whether it is an emailed order, an online purchase, or merely the financial arrangements behind the transaction, the Internet will inevitably be used in conducting international trade.
Even under the immense challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic on the African continent, great opportunities exist for the expansion of trade through trade and development finance. This paper will provide a broad overview of trade and development finance with a focus on Africa as well as underscore the necessity for trade finance. Moreover, although this paper will not serve as an exhaustive audit of trade finance developments in Africa, it will highlight some interesting developments that have occurred in the broad trade finance space in Africa over the past year as well as potential trade and development opportunities.
