The Whitaker Peace & Development Initiative (WPDI) and the Swedish Postcode Foundation recently renewed their partnership to support young African entrepreneurs create some 81 small businesses in northern Uganda. Moving forward, our collaboration will focus on an exciting new initiative that helps incubate youth-led enterprises – the Business Bootcamp.
Since 2016, the Swedish Postcode Foundation – funded by one of Sweden’s largest lotteries – has partnered with WPDI to support our youth empowerment programs in Africa. WPDI is very proud to announce that, upon reviewing our achievements on the ground, the foundation opted to renew their support. This time, our collaboration will focus on economic empowerment in northern Uganda. There, youths constitute some 80 percent of the country’s unemployed. Seventy percent live on less than $2 per day. Sustainable economic development is unquestionably much needed.
In response, WPDI – having learned from six years of work supporting youth-led projects – established a program specifically dedicated to support small businesses designed, developed, and managed by local young people. We plan, over the next two years, to incubate 81 small enterprises developed by a minimum of 1,331 youths and women in the Acholi sub-region and the Kiryandongo Refugee Settlement. There, young women and men – mostly refugees from South Sudan – often have high hopes but rarely the resources to realize those dreams.
WPDI’s Business Bootcamp is explicitly designed to provide them with such resources. We will provide not only funding but capacity-building support, with a focus on long-term sustainability. Our goal is for these 80+ businesses to outlive our intervention, generate real benefits for entrepreneurs, and help their communities develop and flourish. The two-year scope of the program will allow us to follow-up on the progress of individual entrepreneurs, provide them with funds incrementally as they show capacity, learn, and adapt.
The partnership between WPDI and the Swedish Postcode Foundation is a commitment to lasting peace and sustainable development. It is also an acknowledgment of the trust we mutually share in the notion that young women and men from vulnerable and conflict-affected areas have the power to make a difference and create positive change for themselves and their communities.