Sustainable Youth Development Foundation (SYDF)

If selected as a winner, i will use the Elevate Prize to construct SYDF's own premises and scale up the training center to a fully fledged hands on skills training and development institute with an independent Eco friendly hands on products factory on a piece of land we already own.

I grew up as an orphan not because my father was dead but because he rejected me for reasons i will never know. I struggled through life trying to find answers and fortunately was able to go through school and to acquire a job.

My first professional job placement was with the streets under Save Street Children Uganda (SASCU) a child rights agency where I worked for over five years. While working with street connected children, rescuing, rehabilitating and reintegrating them into their communities, I realised the children now turned youth struggled to get integrated into the employment system. 

This propelled me into thinking of ways how this challenge could sustainably be reduced. Hence in November 2015 starting Sustainable Youth Development Foundation (SYDF) a Community Based Organisation whose theory of change is to combat unemployment among the youth through hands on skills training and development.

SYDF focuses on equipping the youth with different product oriented and employable hands on skills including tailoring, hairdressing, bakery, computer basics, making paper bags, reusable sanitary pads and liquid soap. The products from these skills are sold to generate income for self-sustainability. 

Our vision is a youth generation whose standards of living are self-sustainably improved.

The high unemployment is called Uganda’s ticking time bomb (Mbogo, 2015) local media; high unemployment rates means that a lot of youths are left without anything constructive to do. Plain Facts; Uganda's youth unemployment is on a rise - quarter a million of additional youth have jobs in just five years (2013 - 2017) Source: ILO.

SYDF is a community based organisation / social enterprise combating the problem of youth unemployment through equipping them with employable hands on skills in various skills such as hairdressing, bakery, tailoring, computer basics, making of reusable sanitary pads, paper bags and liquid soap.

The new approach that makes SYDF's work unique is that all our trainings are product oriented meaning each and every trainee has to have a product on/or ready for the market by the end of the training, require low starting capital as Business and we use the triple bottom approach which is social, economic and environment impact to measure our work's impact. 

SYDF is having an impact on humanity in a sense that socially our products and training create employment mainly for the youth and different communities, economically the employment provided helps to generate income for both households and individuals and environmentally, all our products are environment friendly especially the reusable sanitary pads which contribute to sanitary waste management and the paper bags which are a better alternative to plastic bags.