YES we can: celebrating the first graduates of the Youth Engagement for Social Change programme
In October 2023, the first cohort of students graduated from the Youth Engagement for Social Change (YES) Programme. This civic engagement initiative was designed to empower young people within the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya to develop as changemakers committed to serving their communities.
The course was delivered by Amala implementation partner Kakuma Vocational Centre (KVC), a community-based organisation whose mission is to equip refugees and the host community with the tools to create better futures for themselves and each other.
Our pioneering group was formed of 25 students between the ages of 15 to 19, all from refugee backgrounds who took part alongside their secondary school studies. The students developed and implemented projects to improve their community through our ten week Social Entrepreneurship course. Students then took part in wellbeing and leadership workshops for a further eight weeks, building their leadership abilities and learning more about how to look after their own wellbeing - common threads which run through all Amala courses.
Patrick, KVC Facilitator and Coordinator said of the students:
“Students are enjoying the workshops. It goes with what they are learning in social entrepreneurship. Students are leading groups - they understand that there is a need for leadership and wellbeing. Before they didn’t understand why we mixed the course with these workshops - now they understand. It’s useful. Entrepreneurship was to prepare them to understand - those things work together. When you are a leader you are well positioned, you can lead people. They are also learning how to maintain the environment and the community in a good way. They like it. Compared to our other classes, they come more.”
An integral aspect of the programme was the Pitch Day, where students presented their projects to panellists put together by the KVC team, which included facilitators, KVC directors and coordinators, and community leaders. Two standout projects, "Soap Making for Fighting Forced Marriage to Promote Self-Reliance '' and "Vegetables to Fight Alcoholism," were awarded seed funding to get them off the ground.
The soap making project, spearheaded by 19-year-old Sudanese student Hawa, was born from observing the issue of forced marriage of women and girls. The group identified that economic hardship was a key factor leading to forced marriages, forcing girls to stop their education and lose hope for the future. Their solution was to provide girls with an opportunity to earn income, become self-reliant, and help their families and communities. By producing and selling soap, these girls can both make their own sanitary products and sustain themselves economically. “The project will awaken many girls who have been thinking that they cannot live without depending on boys or men”, said the group in their winning proposal.
The vegetable growing project addresses some of what the other winning group believes to be among the root causes of alcoholism: depression, poverty, and loss of hope. The students’ project will allow participants, some of whom will be victims of alcoholism, to grow vegetables and sell them at the market, and use the profits to invest in starting their own businesses. The social impact aspect across all projects was clear: a commitment to empower others to become social entrepreneurs, thus initiating a domino effect of change.
Among the innovative ideas conceptualised by the students included initiatives to tackle drug abuse in the community, through an ice-cream selling initiative aimed at vulnerable people, to sustain them both socially and financially. Another project sought to equip girls and young women with bread making skills so that they can support themselves by selling baked goods, instead of turning to sex work to make a living.
The next cohort of the YES programme began in November 2023, bringing with it a new wave of enterprising and exciting ideas for igniting social change in Kakuma Camp.