Young Women Leadership, Madagascar

Project name: Young Women Leadership Program

Project location:  Antananarivo, Madagascar

Website:  https://youthfirstmadagascar.wixsite.com/youthfirst

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/youthfirstmadagascar/

Project description:

The Young Women Leadership Program is designed to enhance the capability of young women, aged 18-24, to develop policy and programs that respond to Malagasy realities and needs. Youth First’s approach to leadership development is anchored on the belief that action learning is best achieved through a combination of methods that include practice, dialogue, exposure to new information and new perspectives, and personal reflection. The training is conducted with the acquisition of new skills, team work and critical reflections. Apart from developing their leadership skills at a personal level and in their communities, participants foster social innovation through the development of a community project to be implemented. During the course of the program, participants will be supported to develop a project for change to be implemented with their constituencies and, at the end of the program, a group of experts will select up to five projects to receive small grants from Youth First.

Goal and purpose of the project:

The program develops competencies in leadership; project and financial management; supervision; strategic communication; fundraising; and advocacy to assist participants in assuming increased responsibilities and accountability within their organizations. The program offers participants a platform for exchange of best practices, interaction and discourse with technical experts, access to resources and contacts, often inaccessible in the field. The goal of the Young Women Leadership Program is to strengthen young women’s management, leadership and technical skills to enhance and bring to scale programs that advance young women’s empowerment.

Motivation of the applicant / applicant team:

Our organisation is a small grassroot organisation who has been operating for 5 years now but has treamendeous achievement in promoting Youth especially girls economic empowerment. For us this is more an opportunity bring to the light small initiative that are initiated by local organisation but who at scale can have bigger impact. We would like to share our experience and tell a new story of Malagasy young people who are resiliant and agent of change. We would like to demonstrate that young people are driving change and are implementing scalable and efficient strategy for poverty alleviation

Use of prize money:

With the money we would like to rent a space for year to establish our youth civic and enterpreunership incubator to sustain our activities. Over the past 5 years we supported the creation of more than 25 small youth led buisness and initiative and we would like to create this space to provide more capacity building and coaching to our beneficiaries but as well create more emerging young leader. We would like to set up an office where we can receive our funders and partners and really project the image of a strong youth organisation and tell the world that a Youth organisation can have a basement.