Liberia is a small country situated on the West Coast of Africa with a population of a little over 4 million people. It has a very young population which the national census records put at more than 60%. Most of Liberia’s youth have little or no formal education, and they also don’t have technical or vocational training to enable them acquire gainful employment or become self-employed. It was in an attempt to help mitigate, to some extent, these enormous challenges faced by vulnerable youths living abject poverty that the Vocational Skills for Vulnerable Youth Project was proposed by SHIFSD, thorough its partner African Outreach, and proposal was subsequently approved by the Souter Charitable Trust in May 2018.
The Vocational Skills Training for Vulnerable Urban Youth Project is intended to provide functional vocational skills and other professional trainings to vulnerable youths between the ages of 18 to 25.
The target beneficiaries are those with the average age of 23 who have either dropped out from basic school, graduated from high school, or is a disabled person. Preference is also given to enrolment of young women into the vocational skills program.
The vocational skills trainings courses are Masonry, Plumbing, Architecture Drafting, Tailoring, Auto-mechanics, primary school training and Agro-vocational training for semi-urban disadvantaged youths on the outskirt of Monrovia, particularly lower Johnsonville, Montserrado County.
The project also provided the SHIFSD Centre (which includes the SHIFSD Institute for Enterprise and Job Training – The BRIDGE) with a facelift by polishing the offices and classrooms’ floors, painting the buildings and putting ceramic tiles in the computer classroom, director office, and all ten bathrooms at the centre.