The MYCRO Garden of Hope Training Centre in Grafton, Freetown, Sierra Leone, is a Youth development Centre training and empowering young people to be self-reliant and self-sustainable. We strive to contribute to changing the lives of young people in Sierra Leone.
Demographic segregation of the African population indicates that youths form the largest segment of the population in Africa. Hence, developmental efforts must target and/or capture the youthful population to have a tangible and meaningful impact. The terms youth empowerment and entrepreneurship are broadly employed to explain efforts aimed at providing coping skills and an enabling environment for youths to lead decent lives and contribute meaningfully to development. An emerging trend in youth empowerment in Sierra Leone and other African countries is entrepreneurship education. Entrepreneurship education assumed importance against the background of poverty, widespread unemployment, and the need to shift the attention of the citizenry away from white-collar jobs and government patronage. At Movement for Youth and Children’s Rights organization (MYCRO), we nurture young people by providing studies and practical strategies that highlight the importance of youth empowerment towards attaining sustainable development in Sierra Leone and Africa. This program helps examine the place of entrepreneurship education in the empowerment of youths and attempts to identify missing links in the execution of entrepreneurship education initiatives. In Sierra Leone, the youthful population is categorized into two; in-school and out-of-school youths. The MYCRO life skills and entrepreneurship program appraised the relative spread and intensity of education initiatives (especially government-facilitated entrepreneurship education) amongst both groups. While entrepreneurship education initiatives targeting in-school youth are easily noticeable in most of these communities in Sierra Leone, the same cannot be said about out-of-school youth. Meanwhile, based on Sierra Leone’s literacy, school enrolment, and tertiary institution matriculation examination/admission records, it can be inferred that out-of-school youths are far outnumbered by in-school youths. Therefore, MYCRO recommended specific and deliberate community efforts to impart entrepreneurial skills to out-of-school youths as a means to empower them to contribute to the sustainable development of Sierra Leone society. This initiative has as primary targets, drop-outs from secondary schools, and young people who cannot proceed to higher institutions after their secondary education.
