Entrepreneurship and Skills Development
SRI acknowledges education as the most important tool for transforming societies. Within the rural setting in our operations, there are many families facing challenges to education such as lack of school fees or inaccessibility to affordable, quality education. Coupled with that is a high turnover of youthful school leavers and dropouts with no tangible life skills to sustain them in order that they can be productive members of society. This has often led to challenges in young people resorting to crime or alcohol and substance abuse, making them become a burden to society.
Skills Development
Most rural youths and women lack employable skills. In rural areas, only 5% of youths proceed to higher levels of learning. There is thus high dropout rates from formal learning. While we encourage and support formal education and training, we have to also equip youths and women, who opt not to continue with academic learning with technical and vocational skills to enhance their employability. We have established workshops for skills training and adopted accredited Competency Based Curricula (CBC) approved by the Technical, Vocational Education, and Training Authority (TVET). SRI offers training on:
- Carpentry and joinery
- Tailoring and dress making
- Organic agriculture
- ICT trainings
- Skills acceleration projects
These trainings are offered through the SRI Vocational Training Centre which was registered in 2020.
Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship skills are important in creating new opportunities in rural communities. It also facilitates utilization of skills training to create new startups, businesses and enterprises. These is a much better way of addressing rural youth unemployment. SRIs entrepreneurship program includes:
- Business plan development
- Value chains
- Internships and mentorships
- Labour market analysis.
- Engagements with the private sector.
- Access to capital
- Financial literacy
Education
We support our eight partner schools through;
- Strengthen teaching and learnings, school leadership and management .
- Equipment and facilities.
- Scholarships and bursaries for needy students.
- Community dialogues and other school projects .
- Integrating ICTs in Education
- Learning through Play
- Community library
- Supported 23 students in the scholarship program. 4 students from the program are currently in University.
- Registered with TVET and CDAC
- Established skills workshop for carpentry and tailoring
- Developed approved training programs for carpentry, joinery and tailoring.
- Acquired state of the art carpentry and tailoring equipment.
- Trained 25 youth in carpentry
- Trained 20 women in tailoring
- Held 9 ICT training sessions.
- Established operational community library with 1500 books.
- Registered 42 community members as library users.
