By Alimatu Jalloh
The SOS Children’s Villages has on Friday 10th March, 2023 launched a Self-Reliance and Empowerment project, in a ceremony held at the school’s hall at Lumley in the West of Freetown. The Self-Reliance project is geared towards empowering young people, and consolidating its other youth oriented programs.
According to the Country Director SOS Children’s Villages, Sophie Ndong, the Project supports the organization’s purpose of empowering young people on a path to independence through entrepreneurship and development.
“We know young people are at the gist of crisis and we want to a step ahead in doing what we are doing today to step up and establish projects and systems that these youth can lean on and have no more excuse for not succeeding in life,” she noted.
She furthered that they want to give the youth all what they need for progress in life; adding that she was shocked to see adults coming to the office identifying themselves as SOS children. “I was shocked and want to embrace that passion to change the narratives that the work we have started doing since then.”
She informed that 52% of the programme participants in Sierra Leone are young people. He added that with the closure of the youth facilities, stronger measures are needed to accompany the reintegration or programme exit and that the Project’s specific objectives are to develop the entrepreneurial capacity, knowledge and performance of youth in the SOS children’s village, to assist them achieve financial independence and to inspire them to leverage their skills and abilities to become job creators.
According to the Chief Executive Officer, Modupeh Taylor Pearce, who is also the founder of Breakfast Club Africa Leadership, which is a Pan African Organisation that has impacted over 2,000 African Leaders with leadership coaching and knowledge-sharing services and the curator of the Made in Africa Leadership Conference , the project idea stemmed from the reality in Sierra Leone and other countries that every year young people graduate without having jobs; thus the need for them to become job creator or entrepreneurs.
He said that to become one, it requires special kind of training which “SOS Children’s villages in sierra Leone has taken a bold approach to be pioneers in providing for its beneficiaries, so that as they are completing University they will have the skills to be able to create successful and sustainable businesses right in sierra Leone.”
Speaking in terms of the packages the young people will get, he said each one of them would be going through approximately 40 hours of practical experiential training in entrepreneurship over the course of the six-month duration of the training. He added that they would get a chance to register their own business ventures, test out the business ideas to learn from other successful business owners and to be part of an incubation hub. The CEO noted that the participants would meet with some investors together with which they would work to grow their business from the idea stage to a functional business “We are going to give them that start up that they need in order for them to create a successful business” he said.
He added that learning about how to be an entrepreneur is now crucial sand that is why it is encouraging that it has been incorporated in education at the SOS children’s villages, where it has been on the forefront in innovation. He said that the institution is now scaling it up to the next level, noting that young people have to create jobs “because government cannot do all, but for them to be able to create jobs they have to be educated on how to create jobs.”