Youth skills in focus – Building Youth Capabilities for Work and Life in Kenya

Zizi Afrique Foundation
By Rosemary Oyollo, Grant Manager, Porticus 

Our vision is for a world where all people are able to live with dignity. Where the youth are empowered with the agency, skills, and competencies to overcome challenges and rise above circumstance.

When ‘soft skills’ like empathy, spirituality, resilience, and collaboration combine with traditional academic and technical ‘hard’ skills including literacy, numeracy and critical thinking, young people will be better equipped to reach their full potential. This is the foundation of our work around education, our Building Future Generations focus, which prioritises the full scope of young people’s developmental needs – from socio-emotional to cognitive skills. This approach is even more important for young people facing extreme adversity to improve their prospects.

But we cannot do this alone. Just like it takes a village to raise a child, it requires a society to change a system.

This is why our strategy is to partner with changemakers deeply rooted in their communities who are dedicated to creating societies and systems where everyone can thrive. One such changemaker is our Kenyan-based partner, Zizi Afrique Foundation. Our common vision is to facilitate the necessary changes in systems, policy, and practice to create “an Africa where every young person has equal opportunity to grow, learn, think and thrive.”

Our starting point is technical, vocational education and training (TVET) which is designed to prepare students for a range of occupations and livelihoods and will play a crucial role in supporting National Sustainable Development (social, economic, and environmental) in Kenya. Through our long-standing partnership with Zizi Afrique Foundation in our Building Youth Capabilities for Work and Life programme which began in 2017, we are seeing results and key milestones in system change.

Following extensive research, stakeholder, and influencer engagement to build a better understanding of TVETs, their role in youth development and how Whole Youth Development (WYD) can improve future prospects, the Kenyan government is now fully on board. It shares the commitment to ensure young people are future-ready and has identified TVET as a priority to create the system change needed to elevate our youth out of poverty.

Transferrable skills under WYD in the instructors’ curricula by the Kenya School of TVET are being improved with Zizi Afrique Foundation playing an instrumental role in increasing understanding on the importance of elevating the place of ‘soft skills’ in the TVET curriculum and elevating TVETs’ status in society by showing how a combination of hard and soft skills is needed for meaningful future employment.

“Youth accessing TVET in Kenya, especially those facing adversity, should develop the capabilities needed to build resilience and could achieve their full potential as individuals. For themselves, and for the greater good of society,” says Renaldah Mjomba at Zizi Afrique Foundation. “We share our government’s ambition of ‘every young Kenyan, a skill’.”

Zizi Afrique continues to conduct research and share findings to build confidence and increase funding in TVET while engaging a range of stakeholders, including government, opinion leaders, influencers, policymakers, and young people in communities across the country.

“Economies can only grasp emerging opportunities if they develop the right skills and competencies in their citizens,” reveals Dr John Mugo at Zizi Afrique Foundation. “Investing in TVET is investing in Kenya’s socio-economic development. It holds the key to technological progress, rapid industrialisation, wealth creation and poverty reduction.”

Curriculum reform successes include:

• The Kenya School of TVET is now embedding transferable WYD skills into trainers’ national curriculums (since January 2023)

• Zizi Afrique now has 12 Vocational Training Centre (VTC) early adopters (through their programme readiness grants) who are being guided through the process of developing, piloting, and implementing WYD approaches.
  
  
• Since January 2023, the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development has introduced a new Competency Based Education and Training Agricultural certificate with a curriculum that integrates

• The Kenyan government is actively championing transformative reforms in TVET to increase access, enhance the quality and importantly, to align the curricula and skills with job market demands.

As part of their Strategy 2025, Zizi Afrique Foundation aims to reach five million young people, including one million who are the ‘furthest left behind’. Their three pillars work in sync to achieve this goal: evidence generation and learning, advocacy for policy change and innovation for improved practice.

Together, our focus remains to integrate the principle and vision of WCD/WYD into education systems, and we will continue to collaborate with our partners to positively shape policy and practice, to equip young people with competencies for learning, living, and working.