Skilling and Mentoring Youth Kenya’s Coastal Region

By Samuel Mugacha , Imaginable Futures

Kenya’s second-largest city, Mombasa, is a melting pot of rich Swahili culture. Of the 1.3M locals who call it home, more than 500,000 are youth.

Despite their aspirations and career dreams, nearly half of the city’s youth are either unemployed or working in informal jobs and struggling to make ends meet due to the lack of opportunities.

Investing in Opportunity Youth

Swahilipot Hub Foundation (Swahilipot), a community-driven organization that promotes entrepreneurship, technology, creative arts and skills development, is working to support the ecosystem around “opportunity youth,” who are defined as young people (ages 16-24) who are not enrolled in school nor participating in the labor market. Their range of programs includes training workshops, mentorship programs, networking events and access to co-working spaces.

“We mentor and support youth to seize opportunities around them and showcase that it’s possible to make a decent living through designing and executing solutions unique to our coastal community,” said Mahmood Noor, founder of Swahilipot. Incredibly, to date, Swahilipot has mentored more than 4,000 members, with 65% of them being youth.

We invested in Swahilipot because of their unique approach to supporting youth development through direct interventions and their collaborative structure through partnerships with youth skilling organizations, the private sector, Technical and Vocational Education Training (TVETs) and the county government.

As the anchor partner for the Global Opportunity Youth Network (GOYN) initiative in Mombasa, Swahilipot has partnered with Global Development Incubator (GDI) to bring together local development partners, policymakers, employers and youth skilling organizations in the county to address the youth unemployment challenges and increase skilling, employment or entrepreneurship opportunities.

Read More

On our blog, read more about Swahilipot's impact on young people and how it's changed the life of Joan Otieno, a 28-year-old travel entrepreneur who has built her own Airbnb business.