Innov4Youth –The Missing Links

African youths are entering the workforce and dream of being the “captains” of current and future industries. However, they face several obstacles that inhibit their innovation journey as they take their ideas to the market. Sadly, this problem is not unique to the African continent.

To accelerate youth resilience and empower them to seize opportunities, take risks, and find resources to fulfill their dreams, we need to fill the Missing Links by providing solutions to these challenges.

In partnership with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and other stakeholders, the African Telecommunications Union (ATU) hosted the Innov4Youth-Missing Links session. This session focused on real stories of challenges and opportunities for youths. It also focused on the following areas of inclusion that need to be unlocked for the young African talents: updating technical universities to entrepreneurial universities, building inclusive support provider service networks, developing agile procurement for startups and SMEs, enabling global market access for innovation scale-up, and strengthening ecosystem policies, strategies, and governance. Actors from governments, the private sector, development partners, and civil society will discuss concrete commitments to address these challenges.

ATU and ITU aimed to launch and establish Innov4Youth to be a long-term interventional initiative. These mechanisms will provide a guiding principle for focused pledges that will unlock opportunities for young African innovators using the Partner2Connect Digital Coalition framework.

The following questions were addressed in the session:

•What are the key challenges and opportunities for young African innovators?

•How will addressing these challenges increase the resilience of Africa’s young talent and empower them for growth and socio-economic development?

•As a way forward, what initiatives, commitments, and interventions are the public and private sectors making to help African youths?