Enhancing Employability of the adolescent girls and teenage mothers through skills development

For the past 10 years, I have lived and worked in the areas of Nakulabye, Rubaga division, a Kampala district suburb, I witnessed many youth fail to pursue their academic dreams because of poverty. I got a dream to start a skilling development program to help the underprivileged youth to acquire skills for employment. I founded Minds feed, a philanthropic umbrella that streamlines the plans and activities to enable our youth achieve the social and economic wellbeing of their lives. Minds feed has a team of experts who are experienced with industry employment requirements and our trainees complete while they are ready to compete favorably in the growing IT driven environment. Since 2021, we have empowered over 100 youths with skills for employment and 80% of them are employed in different sectors earning income for their livelihood.
This time round, Minds feed wishes to empower the underprivileged adolescent girls and teenage mothers with advanced ICT skills in Microsoft tools (Windows OS and Office suites), Mobile Applications development and Adobe suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, XD, Premiere Pro) in order to increase their opportunities for a decent employment. After covid 19 lockdown, many parents were unable to take their children back to school and subsequently, many of the children took the illegal and non-productive way of leading their lives. Many girls were impregnated at a young age and are struggling to look after their families, others started hawking merchandise within their villages whose risk of molestation/inducement to sex with all its social ills are very high. So We wish to empower our sisters particularly high school dropouts with practical hands-on learning in ICT to acquire commendable skills that matches with the present digital world.
Upon their completion of the program, we will match them with potential employers to practice their skills and knowledge thereby empowering them to generate income for sustainability. Other trained Adolescent Girls and teenage mothers will be able to create their own enterprises both social and entrepreneurial for example internet shops, Web developers, graphics designers, programmers, Video editors among other expected outcomes. We chose this particular field of skilling in ICT since it is very essential to get employment opportunity in this global digital evolution.
Our overall impact is to see that gender gaps have bridged in the social, economic and political spheres and also nurture an entrepreneurship culture to help our sister’s transition into work life or self-employment.