WorkFit and NEPAD Share Notes
The WorkFit team met with Zarina Khan and Cheryl James who are working at NEPAD in the skills and youth portfolio. Their positions are funded by German International Cooperation (GIZ).
The purpose of the meeting was to explore opportunities to collaborate and network.
NEPAD is currently in the process of changing its name to the African Union Development Agency-NEPAD, see more here. The change in name is a result of adopting a more proactive strategy which focuses on the ability of the organisation to deliver at regional and national levels. It allows the organisation to mobilise more resources and bring more coherence and interaction between African countries, the African Union and development partners.
Human capital development features strongly on the AUDA-NEPAD agenda. One such focus area is the Skills Initiative for Africa. The purpose of this initiative is to address the many challenges of having a strong TVET sector. For more details on this project visit the SIFA website.
Another aspect of the programme is the African Skills Portal for Youth Employment and Entrepreneurship. This portal features items on good practices, news, events, communities of practice, and resources related to the problem of youth unemployment. The portal currently features several funding opportunities for work in this field and seeks to replicate and scale the good practices of youth employment initiatives.
The NEPAD team requested that we profile the WorkFit Campaign and Toolkit on the portal. Since the toolkit was based on the experiences of demand-driven training providers across several African countries in the Rockefeller Foundation’s Digital Jobs Africa initiative it will be rewarding to see the South African leg of this work loop back to informing the broader African youth employment community.
The NEPAD team also shared information about the work of Business Africa in coordinating employer engagement for African development goals, and we discussed how our experiences in the WorkFit Campaign could inform these kind of engagements, and vice versa.
We are looking forward to further engagements with the AUDA-NEPAD team and encourage you to browse their good practice library at the African Skills Portal link above.
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