Creating Perspective for Youngsters in Cameroon

Project background: Sub-Saharan need for perspective that Europe can support

We all know that Sub-Saharan countries will be most affected by climate change. This accumulates to the challenges these countries already face, like unemployment, poverty, and low access to health services. In a country like Cameroon, the situation is even more tense as language barriers cause internal socio- and political conflict, resulting in large numbers of internally displaced persons. Especially young people feel left behind, making them vulnerable to violence. It’s therefore important to invest in the future of young people by providing them with a high-quality education relevant to the job market of the 21st century.

The Cameroon National Development Strategy (2020-2030) operationalizes the second part of the vision, providing a framework for sustainable economic and human development. The third pillar of NDS focuses on promoting employment and economic integration, particularly underemployment, matching training to jobs, matching training supply to demand of the productive sector in terms of manpower and support to companies in the sector. 

Given the national strategy, which shows the need for a qualitative impulse in the VET training and link with the labor market, given the high number of applying students for our current “En-power” project as well as the great interest already shown by government and companies to partner for a relevant skills training, the consortium developed the “Cameroon Renew-ed” project proposal: improving the capacity of the VET system on renewable energy co-creating a training program by European education institutes, local private sector, and local training organizations so that national government will see the value of the training and adopt the program on a national level. The program is state-of-the-art based on the latest developments in the renewable energy sector, using digital tools as to deliver blended learning methods.