Coaching and mentoring support

The second key action is to support youth groups through coaching and mentorship. We do not assume that coaching and mentoring is completely absent under the programme framework but given the volume of groups supported, the ministry can use the help of the third party to oversee some youth groups and document the value addition of this kind of support before rolling out on large scale. Our proposed approach to providing a reliable and robust estimate of the value addition is to initially create treatment and control groups and support the former with coaching and mentoring support while excluding the latter. Our proposed coaching and mentoring in factcritiques business as usual and departs from the conventional coaching based on standard manuals and biased to organizational strengthening. We seek to conduct coaching and mentoring based on bottom up principles which means the youth groups receive technical support where it is needed most but most importantly, help them get integrated in the local economy through their chosen enterprises. One of the biggest challenges facing youth projects is the disconnect from broader local economy. Usually, these youth projects are established as enclaves which operate oblivious of the other actors and the market they would eventually have to enter. Resultantly, these youth businesses collapse shortly after funding.  We are not coming with a ready to use formula on how to do mentoring and coaching but propose to approach it differently from the conventional approach and document lessons. Provided there is value addition supported by the evidence from the experiment, we can move forward to consolidating it into concise guide with illustrations of the potential benefits.