Enthusiasm abounds among Latin American youth, but the hard skills required to lead successful social and business enterprises are relatively rare.
The Partnership for Promoting Youth Development and Participation, a recently concluded project partly financed by a $750,000 IDB grant, was designed in part to address the need for better management skills among Latin American youth leaders. The project, which also had financing and management support from the International Youth Foundation and the Inter-American Foundation, worked through established nongovernmental organizations in Ecuador, Paraguay, Guatemala, and Trini-dad and Tobago. These entities provided a variety of management training workshops for youth mentors and leaders, along with technical and financial assistance to young, lower-income entrepreneurs. They also helped to disseminate “best practices” for program management.
In Ecuador, the Esquel Foundation provided training to some 3,335 young people through 13 individual projects that covered 24 cities and 22 rural districts. In Paraguay, the Centro de Información y Recursos para el Desarrollo organized 11 social enterprise projects, two participation workshops and two youth leadership training seminars.
In Guatemala, the Asociación Cristiana de Jóvenes used project funds to finance nearly 100 microenterprises. It also created several youth information centers and provided leadership training to 740 young people. In Trinidad and Tobago technical assistance was provided to 32 representatives of various youth-led or youth-serving organizations. The IDB’s country office in Trinidad and Tobago also used project funds to create the Youth Advisory Board, which consists of youth representatives who advise the country office on youth affairs on a permanent basis.