Zambia - Skills Development and Entrepreneurship Project - Supporting Women and Youth

The Zambia Skills Development and Entrepreneurship Project – Supporting Women and Youth (SDEP-SWY) aims to promote job creation, gender equality and poverty reduction. It seeks to improve the livelihood opportunities of Zambia’s working poor, especially in rural areas and will benefit particularly, women and youth through enabling infrastructure and entrepreneurship for MSME business development. The Project will support the Government in its drive to address youth unemployment and reduce rural poverty and underemployment by creating about a million jobs in the medium term through support to the implementation of the Industrialization and Job Creation Strategy to ultimately promoting inclusive growth. Interventions are essentially focused on development of: (i) industrial cluster infrastructure and enabling environment to enhance MSMEs competiveness and (ii) the cassava value chain sub-sector targeting mostly the rural poor. The Project will be implemented over 60 months beginning January 2016.