Makerere-Penn State Team wins 2013 Africa Collaboration Challenge Prize
The Global Knowledge Initiative and Penn State University are thrilled to announce the winners of the 2013 Africa Collaboration Challenge Prize. A research team composed of Michael Kansiime and John Kabasa from AFRISA (African Institute for Strategic Animal Resource Services and Development), a center at Uganda’s Makerere University, and Sjoerd Duiker and Ephraim Govere from PSU won $20,000 for their proposal “Youth Employment and Income Enhancement Project (YEIEP): Haymaking as a Business Opportunity.”
With seed funding of $20,000, YEIEP will bring together AFRISA’s expertise in providing hands-on skills building in production, value addition, and entrepreneurship development; and a hay-baling business incubator PSU has initialized with the Zawadi Youth Enterprise, a community organization in Nyeri, Kenya. This partnership will work toward tackling the high rate of unemployment among youth in Uganda and Kenya. YEIEP will produce training materials and organize a workshop to train Ugandan and Kenyan students in skills needed to start their own haymaking businesses. With this prize, YEIEP plans to establish ten new haymaking businesses. Project leaders hope that their work will serve as a model for future projects, and that by taking their efforts to scale, a partnership that began in Pennsylvania at the Africa Collaboration Colloquium will contribute to spreading economic and social benefits to young people throughout East Africa.
Contributor: Courtney O’Brien
