Youth Empowerment Project (YEP) — The Gambia's EU-Funded Mini-Grant and Training Scheme for Young Entrepreneurs

The Gambia's 2016-17 political transition coincided with high youth unemployment and heavy outward migration toward Europe. The Youth Empowerment Project (YEP) was designed under the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa to address the economic root causes of that migration by building livelihoods for young Gambians at home.

To combine vocational and soft-skills training, entrepreneurship advisory services, and a Mini-Grant Scheme to create livelihoods in agribusiness, tourism and services — sectors judged to have the largest job-creation potential.

Running from February 2017 to December 2022 with EUR/USD financing of about $12.8m, YEP delivered training, advisory services and mini-grants of up to GMD47,000 (funded by a roughly $250,000 pool) for equipment, materials and other start-up assets. Delivery ran through more than 20 local implementing partners alongside the Gambian Ministries of Trade and of Youth & Sports.

By completion, YEP had trained 5,350 young people and supported 4,600 through advisory services, market access or finance, contributing to an estimated 4,300 jobs. A September 2020 survey of Mini-Grant beneficiaries found 91% of grant-funded companies had maintained their employee count despite the COVID-19 shock. The scheme was extended with a dedicated COVID-19 relief window reaching 255 further beneficiaries by end of 2020; cumulatively the Mini-Grant Scheme is credited with sustaining 382 existing jobs and creating 833 new ones.

These figures come from the programme's own monitoring platforms rather than an independent counterfactual evaluation, so they describe outputs and reported retention rather than causally attributed impact — a caveat worth weighing alongside the otherwise consistent, cross-sourced figures. The programme ran its planned six-year cycle and closed in December 2022.