OKURUT DARWIN JOSEPH

USAID Opharns and Vulnerable Children(OVC) North West Activity/ Youth Alive Uganda(YAU) was a five-year project implemented in the 12 districts of Lango and Acholi. The project had 3 thematic areas including health which focused on enrollment of people living with HIV into care, ensuring their viral load was suppressed and most importantly, ART retention for all enrolled. Education focused on child school retention, progression and completion, building children’s capacity to be able to read and write and under critical cases offered education subsidies especially for non-suppressed HIV positive. Lastly, the Economic Empowerment through VSLA group formation so that beneficiaries tapped into the OVC fund, alternative skilling for Young Adult Peers(YAPs)at clinics as was a way of empowering them to generate household income and kitchen gardening to boast nutrition. Case management and Social Protection goal was to achieve the 95,95,95 HIV/AIDS cascade through ensuring all the HIV positive clients were targeted for viral load tracking, on-suppressing Children Living with HIV(CLHIV) were identified and offered services from linkage to Intensive Adherence Counselling(IAC), psychosocial support and linkage to ART services. Social protection focused on VSLA group formation and mapping of children for education subsidies. Therefore, i coordinated these activity

Youth Alive Uganda with Heifer International Uganda collaborated and implemented the East Africa Youth Inclusion Program(EAYIP) EAYIP had four strategic objectives which included; Skills Development - This was meant to equip youth with the necessary skills that established businesses around the hub and provided with employment in hub-related agribusinesses Access to Finance - This strategic Objective helped to Facilitate access to finance for young entrepreneurs which led to expansion of businesses for both youth groups and individuals. This was successful through training of youth in VSLA, Financial Literacy, soft Skills development, Entrepreneurship training, Business skills development/business plan development and Linkage banking training along with other Financial institutions including post bank Uganda and Equity bank Uganda. Enabling Environment - Enabling environment helped to enhance and increase youth participation in agribusiness and this strategic objective was done in the following ways; training of youths in advocacy that empowered them to demand for better services from Local Government and many young people received agricultural inputs like the 30 goats, a tractor, training, pesticides, land among others. Many community dialogues were also conducted with Local leaders and technocrats where youth issues were addressed like the lowering of registration fees for groups at the sub county and district, district wide campaigns involved the district leaders and other stake holders, training of youth leaders in leadership was also conducted among others. The fourth strategic objective was hub model; Youth were registered to take part in the hub related activities including taking up leadership positions(4 youths became board members, one female youth became the hub manager. Other successes included; over 2000 youths were able to register with the hub after payment of membership fees, over 500 youth were directly employed in the hub related businesses like yogurt making and selling, 10 youth groups composed of 30 members each received various trainings in apiary, fish ponds, modern cassava, soya, groundnut growing, carpentry, BCP, poultry among others. I coordinated this to ensure success was realized