Ethiopia—BRIDGES

Ethiopia aspires to reach middle-income status by 2025 and is investing heavily in building industrial parks to help drive structural transformation and export-led economic growth. The country’s labor force is expanding by 2 million each year, which means it’s vital to both invest in existing business growth and spur the development of new micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSME’s) for job creation.

The BRIDGES project, funded by the Mastercard Foundation, and implemented by First Consult and DAI, aims to support industrial park job creation and market linkage between these parks and MSMEs. The project focuses on enhancing the competitiveness of the industrial sector to attract qualified workers and will offer support to existing MSMEs.

BRIDGES hopes to support 600,000 new youth jobs and 15,000 new MSMEs, with 300,000 unemployed young people trained. BRIDGES is part of MasterCard’s ‘Young Africa Works’ program, which uses youth employment as a measure of progress and works to help millions of young people find a pathway out of poverty.

DAI’s role is to provide capacity building services, such as support in financial management, to ensure that First Consult is managing the BRIDGES project well.

Sample Activities

• Provide program management and best practice support and training, including: internal review, approval, and documentation methodologies and tools, support process flow and templates currently being used by BRIDGES.

• Provide support for recruitment, compliance, project management software, health and safety/safeguarding, and human resources, to develop bespoke BRIDGES policies and processes.

• Provide technical input in the implementation of the BRIDGES contract, including review and support on the design of key strategies and implementation modalities of interventions.