The Green Entrepreneurship Programme has been launched by the Tony Elumelu Foundation in partnership with UNICEF Generation Unlimited (GenU), the IKEA Foundation, and Young Green Entrepreneurs in order to address the high rate of youth unemployment in Africa.
The Tony Elumelu Foundation’s digital platform, TEFConnect, is now accepting applications for BeGreen Africa from all Kenyan waste management start-ups as well as green start-ups in Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal, and South Africa.
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The project will gather data on young people starting businesses in high-impact green industries and investigate how they can support circular economies and a long-lasting green revolution in Africa.
This mission-aligned partnership’s main goal is to establish a comprehensive, long-lasting, and youth-led green entrepreneurship initiative in the waste sector (in Kenya) and the green sector (in Nigeria, Morocco, Senegal, and South Africa), in order to advance the social and economic prosperity of marginalized youth while addressing the triple planetary crisis by eradicating inequalities and generating sustainable livelihoods for themselves and their peers.
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In this pilot program, #BeGreenAfrica hopes to teach 1,000 Kenyan youth in the field of waste management and give 120 of them access to the economy, as well as give 25 green sector entrepreneurs in Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal, and South Africa, all of whom are under 35, the opportunity to start or expand green firms in their respective countries.