The Mastercard Foundation has provided support to the Centre to enable research on knowledge and opportunities that align with the Foundation’s Young Africa Works Strategy. This will enable the possibility of 30 million young people on the continent to secure dignified and fulfilling work by 2030.
This support from Mastercard Foundation facilitates our mission to generate new possibilities by training new cohorts of academics and researchers in the non-profit sector and changing the African narrative with emphasis on self-reliance and African solutions.
The five-year support of $7.8 million will be undertaken in collaboration with an autonomous African-led network of researchers and institutions. The project focuses on the contributions of the non-profit sector to continental economies, with a specific focus on enabling young people to secure dignified and fulfilling work.
There are three objectives that will be fulfilled through this project:
- Produce data and knowledge that details the extent to which the non-profit sector in 17 African countries can create decent, dignified and fulfilling employment opportunities for young people between the ages of 15 and 35.
- Train 20 doctoral students over a period of five years from across African universities in the disciplines of social entrepreneurship, job creation, technology inclusion, financial inclusion, enterprise development, and youth studies.
- Enable sustainable and reliable knowledge generation through the provision of measurement frameworks, data for decision-making and a digital hub for the purposes of matching the needs and opportunities of young Africans with dignified employment.
‘We co-created this project jointly with the MasterCard Foundation given the two institutions’ desires to contribute towards the resolution of the developmental challenges facing Africa. There is no doubt that the future of the world is based on its youths and the majority of those young people are found in Africa. Africa is therefore at the centre of the future of the world and as such it is important that young Africans are afforded opportunities through dignified jobs and fulfilling opportunities that will in many ways happen through interventions such as financial inclusion, access to affordable technology and addressing of the inequalities that exist between young men and young women. This is a pivotal moment and project to ascertain the several contributions of the non-profit sector and its intersection with young Africans’, said Bhekinkosi Moyo, CAPSI’s Director
The research focuses on 17 African countries, namely:
1. Burkina Faso
2. Cote d’Ivoire
3. Democratic Republic of the Congo
4. Egypt
5. Ethiopia
6. Ghana
7. Kenya
8. Morocco
9. Mozambique
10. Nigeria
11. Rwanda
12. South Africa
13. Senegal
14. Tanzania
15. Uganda
16. Zambia
17. Zimbabwe
