Tanzania—Feed the Future Tanzania Advancing Youth

In the past decade, Tanzania experienced significant improvements—both economically and socially. The country’s gross domestic product has seen above-average growth, mortality for children under age 5 has dropped substantially, more households have electricity, and more young people have completed primary school. However, economic growth has benefited cities more than rural areas, leading to increased rural to urban migration by youth who see farming as a dead-end occupation. With approximately 800,000 young people entering the workforce each year, providing youth with vocational skills and connecting them to employment opportunities has become an increasingly important and urgent need.

To help empower young people in Tanzania, the Advancing Youth Activity, funded by Feed the Future and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), helped young people ages 15 to 29 to enhance their employability, business savvy, leadership skills, and participation in civic life. The program encouraged young people to use health data and services to make better personal choices. The Feed the Future Tanzania Advancing Youth activity collaborated with young people in program design and implementation and built public-private partnerships to bolster job opportunities for them.

The project reached more than 43,000 young people and provided more than $2.3 million in grants to youth-led agribusinesses.

Sample Activities

• Identify potential employment market gaps that youth could fill and partner with local organizations to develop curricula and deliver vocational training to match skills needed by employers.
• Utilize a grants program to support businesses in implementing new on-the-job training opportunities, internships, and placements for youth.
• Foster leadership among youth by adapting the successful Champions for Change experiential leadership development methodology created by USAID’s Africa Lead project.
• Collaborate with the government of Tanzania to implement healthy life skills curricula in schools and roll out community-based healthy life skills services through preexisting networks.

Select Results

• Referred 22,000 young people to access youth-friendly sexual reproductive health services and almost 3,330 youth at risk of violence have been trained on leadership and healthy life skills.
• Trained more than 40,400 young people on entrepreneurship, workforce readiness, leadership, and life skills for healthy living and planning.
• Established or improved 5,200 microbusinesses.
• Helped 1,931 young people to become more active in decision-making bodies.
• Created 3,600 formal and informal jobs.
• Created 312 young savings and lending associations (YSLAs) that, collectively have saved about $1 million. More than 5,370 young people are participating in YSLAs and nearly 4,800 youth have already taken business and quality of life improvement loans.
• Supported a youth group from Iringa that won a prize for empowering women entrepreneurs at an exhibition convened by the Minister of State in the President’s Office of Regional Administration and Local Government. The group’s 20 members, who received business skills management and food processing training from the project, process milk into yogurt which they sell to earn an income.