Eritrea - Enable Youth Eritrea

The ENABLE Youth Eritrea is a skills and capacity development project for youth, whose Bank financing comes from the TSF Pillar I window. It is one of AfDB’s ENABLE Youth Initiatives under the Bank’s Feed Africa Strategy for Agricultural Transformation in Africa. The Bank’s ENABLE Youth initiative is a comprehensive program that builds entrepreneurship in agribusiness via skill acquisition and creates an enabling environment in which young men and women become owners of profitable agribusinesses. The program seeks to encourage the creation and growth of growth of sustainable commercially viable youth agribusinesses by supporting the development of wellstructured agribusiness projects, and providing commercial loans and other financial products/services available for investment in a range of agribusiness ventures, market access, capacity development, risk management, and networking. Eritrea was among the countries in the continent that expressed keen interest in participating in the Bank’s ENABLE Youth Program and requested the Bank’s support for financing. The project will contribute to the objectives of the country’s Integrated Five-year Agricultural Strategic Plan (2019-2023) by identifying innovative and enterprising youth agripreneurs who are willing to pursue business opportunities in agribusiness along key agricultural value chains in the country. It will engage all stakeholders along the agricultural value chain, thus strengthening the entrepreneurship ecosystem and growth of agribusiness ventures. Moreover, the project promotes Public-Private Partnership (PPP) through active collaboration with private enterprises including their participation in the training and apprenticeship of beneficiary students. The total cost is estimated at UA 14.38 million, of which AfDB is financing UA 13.12 million (91.2 %). The project implementation is expected to start in 2020 with a duration of five years.