AU-EU Youth Lab’s Entrepreneurship Grants Program

The Entrepreneurship Grants aim to provide support to youth actors that work on strengthening the economic opportunities for young people!

Focus Areas

• The entrepreneurship grants focus on youth-led actions that address a three-fold selection of key challenges young people face around the world in their economic participation and taking control of their own future:
  • Access to skills development opportunities that are according to the needs of young people and local economic realities and support the start-up of new youth-led enterprises.
  • The responsible growth of youth-led (social) enterprises that consider social and environmental boundaries.
  • An enabling environment for young entrepreneurs to start and grow their business.

Benefits

• Your organisation will receive financial support to implement your skills development project with young people in your own community and beyond
• Your organisation will become part of a platform for you to share your solution with peers, decision-makers and other stakeholders across Africa and Europe
• You will benefit from mentorship and other forms of capacity development support according to the needs of your organisation

Funding Information

• The Entrepreneurship Grants provide grants opportunities between 30.000 and 50.000 EURO for which individual youth organisations and consortiums of youth organisations can apply to.

Eligible Activities

• Your proposal can have a diversity of activities that build upon each other. They are excited to receive your ideas!
• As general guidance, they can identify three broad types of activities:
  • Develop, test and implement new skills development curriculum for young people
    • For example: a new curriculum module that fills a distinct gap identified in advancing young people’s economic participation.
  • Scale-up and existing skills development delivery to reach a wider diversity of young people
    • For example: innovative methods to make skills development curriculums available to young people in remote areas.
  • Nurturing the exchange and coordination between (youth-led) skills development providers, local businesses and/or government actors
    • For example: Setting up learning exchanges between local businesses, young people and skills development providers.
• The activities you propose can be a mixture of the broad types of activities above and do not need to ‘fit in one box’.

Eligibility Criteria

• Your organisation or (social) enterprise is youth-led (age 18 to 35) where young people are the decision makers.
• In case of an enterprise, you are either registered as ‘social enterprise’ or ‘enterprise’. In case of the latter, you can showcase a clear social ambition and impact of the work of your company.
• You are a youth organisation or (social) enterprise that is formal: you are legally registered in your country, have an organisation/enterprise bank account and a governance structure.
• You are located and registered in one of the 12 African Youth Action Lab focus countries: Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia (Somaliland region), Tanzania, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
• Your proposed activity takes place in one or more of the above 12 countries.
• Your annual budget or grants managed in the past should be a minimum of 10.000 EURO.

For more information, visit AU-EU Youth Lab.