The purpose of World Youth Skills Day is to achieve better socio-economic conditions for today’s youth as a means of addressing the challenges of unemployment and encouraging creativity. This day is an opportunity for young people, technical and vocational education and training (TVET) institutions, and public and private sector stakeholders to acknowledge and celebrate the importance of equipping young people with skills for employment, decent work and entrepreneurship. “World Youth Skills Day 2022 will be observed on July 15, 2022. The day stresses on the importance of providing proper training to the youth and creating skills for decent work, employment and entrepreneurship”.

The Jobs, skills and Finance (JSF) for women and Youth in The Gambia program, for example, is a UNCDF and International Trade Center (ITC) partnership working on improving the employability of young people and helping entrepreneurs seize opportunities.

The Event was celebrated on July 16, 2022 at the Jakarlo Hall in Senegambia with the theme “Skills for Youth Empowerment in a Digital Age”. This event was celebrated in partnership with The Gambia Tech Project and we had Mentees and representatives from these two Organizations participate in the Event as Moderators of the various Panels we had.

This Global Celebration was commenced with a welcoming and introductory remarks by the Founder of Coaches of Influence Foundation (COIF), Dr. Margaret Ellis, who gave an overview of the flagship program, Coaches United Nations Simulation (CUNS) which was commemorating the event. Then we had a training on skills and innovation: How to process your ideas into solutions, where the speakers highlighted the connection between ideas and skills and how they lead to or produce solutions at the end of the day.

The first Panel took off with the topic, “needed skills in tech for young people in an African context”. These Panelists highlighted the skills young people need to become more marketable, the level of unpreparedness our young people are in and the available skills that young people can venture into with emphasis for leaders in various positions to take interest in preparing the younger generation for succession, Youths utilizing the internet to learn and strengthen the skills they do not have a teacher for to encourage creativity and innovation, the need for young people to avail themselves to teaching/training as well as developing problem solving skills. 

• The Panelists, Dr. Margaret and Mr. Coly recommended that our Youth should not wait for who is going to give them what, they can blame the government for not providing for them, but that will only give 5 minutes of comfort but your problems still exist. She further strengthened that, what went wrong is our vision, what went wrong is our trust, what went wrong is I and our selfishness and what went wrong is our leadership.
• Dr. Coly in his recommended shed more light on the existing insecurities we have everywhere. In his words, “we have a lot of doubts and insecurities about everything in The Gambia. Anything can happen and anything is possible, let us grab the opportunities to create success”.

All the Panelists, Moderators and speakers, highlighted the importance of skills in our world today and how vital it is for Youths to step in and take up their place in the world of Technology, to ease and expand our results and productivity.

Among the skills and items exhibited were song live performances, spoken words, Poetry and Drama performances by our various School Mentees, videos of compiled handworks (construction), designed Clothes, local drinks, portraits, drawings and paintings of animate and inanimate objects as well.

The opportunity provided to other Youths to display their skills and products in the Exhibition, granted them the opportunity to be supported and patronized by fellow Youths in the room. For some of them, it was an opportunity for them to expand their businesses and launch into new dimensions in pursuing their passions, dreams and goals.

 In their deliberations, the Panelists shared some of the challenges they are also faced with in their various skills and how Technology could alleviate some of these challenges, thus recognizing and acknowledging the need to step up and take advantage of the various available platforms for their businesses.