Randstad Kilimanjaro Challenge for VSO

In October an international team of 25 Randstad colleagues is climbing Kilimanjaro in support of “Access to Decent Green Jobs for Young People”, a VSO project in Kenya focussing on enhancing the livelihoods and wellbeing for marginalized youth from Kisumu, Mombasa, and Nairobi. These young people are facing difficulties both on a personal level (abuse, exploitation, health problems and limited access to information) and on a grander scale (climate change, high unemployment rates).

Your donation will be invested in enhancing the livelihoods and wellbeing of 200 marginalized young people (aged 18 -35) through decent jobs. It is our objective to strengthen green youth-led startups so that they can create decent jobs through waste recovery, value addition and producing environmentally sustainable outputs.

This will include jobs in waste recycling as well as organic agriculture. Especially through the development of youth-led agroecological enterprises to strengthen local food systems, to address the food crisis through climate resilient farming techniques.

To strengthen grass-roots solutions and loop them into the circular economy, the project is based on four strategic building blocks:

The Mobilize building bock is the foundation of the programme. It looks at the market demand and private sector needs. It mobilises grass-roots green entrepreneurs and supports them to self-organise in Youth Business Clubs to increase peer support, increase leadership skills, combine strengths, networks and assets and strengthen social capital.

The Spark building block supports vulnerable young people in starting their waste businesses. This bucket contains technical and entrepreneurship training through a blended learning approach combined with starter kits to generate innovation and offer new perspectives.

The Nurture building block is there for those front-runners ready for Business Development Services, and provides access to business networks and seed investments.

The Link building block is the bucket that enables sustainability of actions by expanding market demand, creating market linkages, and developing connections to formal finance and business networks.

Every step of this approach is part of a pathway to sustainable livelihoods and socio-economic resilience that together will create the conditions for green youth-led start-ups to improve livelihoods for marginalised young people and contribute to the green economy.