Youth-to-Youth Fund

Funding for Youth in Africa » Youth Grants » Entrepreneurship Funding for Youth » Youth Employment Fund

Youth-to-Youth Fund; The Youth Entrepreneurship Facility (YEF) enables African Youth to turn their energy and ideas into business opportunities to increase their income and create decent work for themselves and others.

It is an initiative by the Africa Commission, implemented by the Youth Employment Network (YEN), and the International Labour Organization (ILO).

Main objective

The Youth-to-Youth Fund component of the Facility offers local youth-led organizations an opportunity to actively participate in the development of youth entrepreneurship in their communities.  

It supports small-scale youth entrepreneurship development projects implemented by youth-led organizations.

The Youth-to-Youth Fund was created as a mechanism to identify, test and promote innovative entrepreneurship solutions to youth employment challenges.

This goal is accomplished through a competitive grant scheme for youth-led organizations to propose innovative project ideas on how to create entrepreneurship and business opportunities for their peers.

The organizations with the most innovative project ideas receive a grant and complementary capacity building to help them implement their projects and test the viability of their ideas.

The scheme is implemented simultaneously in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.

Through the YEN/ILO Youth Entrepreneurship Facility (YEF), the Youth-to-Youth (Y2Y) Fund is inviting applications for its newly launched Y2Y Replication Fund Scheme.

The Y2Y Replication Fund for Entrepreneurship Promotion will accept applications from officially registered non-governmental, non-partisan and not-for-profit youth-led organizations to replicate the most successful of the formerly implemented Y2Y Fund projects.

The Replication Fund is part of the YEF's effort to promote the proven entrepreneurship development projects identified and tested through the original Y2Y Fund, to enable as many youth as possible to benefit from these successful models to creating self-employment opportunities.

Proposals should focus on innovative and context specific ways for the youth-led organizations to replicate one of the 14 original Y2Y Fund ideas with the aim of empowering and enabling young people to establish and improve their businesses.

The original project ideas to be replicated have been posted in the YEN Marketplace website for the youth-led organizations to review.

For more information on the Youth-to-Youth Fund and the Replication Fund as well as the application form, information note and description of projects up for replication, please see: