• Youth-Centric Approach: The CarrOpps project focuses on youth engagement and development in Burkina Faso. It uses a co-creation approach, involving youth in the planning and implementation stages to ensure their needs and perspectives are addressed.
• Addressing Employment Barriers: The project identifies and tackles key barriers to youth employment, such as skill gaps, lack of access to financing, and insufficient practical experience. CarrOpps aims to provide solutions through entrepreneurship development, innovative financial access, and digital information dissemination.
• Community Impact and Trust: By employing youth to deliver services and fostering open communication, CarrOpps builds trust within the community. This “by youth and for youth” model helps create a supportive environment where young people feel comfortable sharing their challenges and contributing to the project’s success.

By Mary Kate Cartmill, Associate Manager, Food Systems and Nutrition

Elodie Ouelo understands that learning is a continual process—especially when it comes to driving youth development initiatives. In 2023, inspired by her participation in a young leaders’ fellowship in Ghana, Ouelo dove into learning the barriers to youth employment and entrepreneurship in her home country of Burkina Faso, a cause close to her heart. Through research, interviews, and data collection, she identified a major obstacle: Young people lacked access to the information they needed to find jobs or start businesses.

“This opened my mind to the fact that learning is more about observing continuously and not having prior judgements or conclusions,” Ouelo says.

Today, Ouelo is applying that knowledge as project coordinator for Tanager’s largest and most ambitious youth initiative yet, Carrefour de Opportunités (CarrOpps). Launched in December 2023 and funded by the Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, this five-year project leverages a combination of digital technologies and in-person hubs to improve youth engagement in positive activities while promoting peace.

Innovative Model for Youth Engagement

CarrOpps offers an exciting approach to youth engagement in Burkina Faso, where both the youth population (defined by the project as those aged 18 to 35) and youth unemployment rates are high. In fact, a few factors make CarrOpps stand out as a uniquely innovative project.

First is its co-creation approach. During the project’s first year, Tanager worked closely with nine municipalities and conducted stakeholder workshops with an array of youth representatives—including from local youth councils and chambers of commerce, internally displaced persons (IDP) groups, women’s and disability groups, and more—to ensure a comprehensive understanding of the situation before diving into implementation.

Ouelo notes, “The youth themselves say it is rare for project teams to ask them about their problems and listen without any preconceptions.”

It’s an approach that resonates with her own commitment to community engagement. In 2022, Ouelo was among 40 youths selected to join the prestigious Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI) in Ghana, a U.S. Agency for International Development program that invests in the next generation of African leaders. As a YALI fellow, Elodie embraced the challenge of building strong leadership and community engagement skills through her focus on public policy and management.

“At the end of that learning, I understood that I have a role to play in my community and that I had to take action by launching an initiative that would positively affect my community.”

Underscoring that sentiment, implementation of CarrOpps will be undertaken by youth. Not only does Ouelo herself fit squarely into the “youth” demographic but other young adults are also employed to deliver its services, whether that be as implementing partners of the project, managers of the youth hubs, or providers of services offered through the hubs. This ensures that job creation is happening at every stage of the project.

Ouelo contends this “by youth and for youth” dynamic fosters open communication and trust, positively impacting community interactions. “The youth feel comfortable speaking out about the challenges they go through with project staff,” she says. “They feel confident to tell us what their challenge is.”

 

Breaking Barriers to Employment

This level of openness has provided the CarrOpps team with even deeper insight into the barriers youth face in securing employment in rural Burkina Faso. Though the challenges are many, Ouelo identifies three that stand out:

• Skill gaps among young people seeking employment. This is often the result of a mismatch between formal education and current job market opportunities, according to Ouelo.
• Lack of access to financing for youth. Youth often don’t have collateral to secure a loan and are considered high risk for lenders since their repayment rates remain the lowest in the country. As such, it can be difficult for them to obtain financing.
• Lack of practical experience for job-seeking youth. Formal education remains highly theoretical in Burkina Faso, with few opportunities available for youth to gain practical experience in the classroom or through internship experience. Informal training or jobs are also not often recognized or valued in the formal job sector since they are not considered certified.

Compounding these issues is the overall limited access to information about employment opportunities. According to Ouelo, this is largely due to inadequate communication channels, a lack of funding for information distribution, and insufficient monitoring systems to ensure the youth audiences are reached. (Before CarrOpps, she herself had begun this process by launching her own organization, which created an online space where young entrepreneurs could share their challenges and solutions.)

CarrOpps is addressing these challenges through youth entrepreneurship development, innovative financial access, digital information access, and youth network generation. Using an iterative approach—test, measure, learn—Tanager is also adapting the CarrOpps concept to different communities, ensuring a context-specific solution to the array of challenges.

Ouelo looks forward to witnessing the transformation of Burkina’s employment and entrepreneurship landscape and helping CarrOpps to deliver on youths’ requests for better and more jobs and more accessible opportunities.

“It’s a learning journey,” she says. “As youth, we are learning what affects project dynamics over time. But people understand the project; they believe in the project. And the fact that we are co-creating with them, they believe it will be something different.”