This year's International Youth Day theme, ‘Transforming education’, highlights the efforts to make education more relevant, equitable and inclusive for all youth, which is crucial to achieving sustainable development.

Education is the backbone of society and development and hence plays a pivotal role in accelerating progress across all 17 Sustainable Development Goals, be it; poverty eradication, good health, gender equality, decent work and growth, reduced inequalities, action on climate or building peaceful societies. International Youth Day 2019, will examine how governments, young people and youth-led and youth-focused organizations, as well as other stakeholders, are transforming education and how these efforts are contributing to the achievement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Since 2010 UNCDF has piloted approaches to offer youth (ages 12-24) affordable, relevant and accessible financial products, coupled with complementary non-financial services in eight Least Developed Countries (LDCs) in Africa, by means of it’s YouthStart Expansion programme. The objective of the YouthStart Expansion (YS-E) Programme is to increase access to financial services for low-income youth in Sub-Saharan Africa by developing solutions that offer youth-tailored financial and non-financial services, through a combination of grants and loans, technical assistance and convening power.

During 2018 alone, YouthStart was able to secure almost USD12,000,000 for expansion of our youth finance approach, in Senegal, The Gambia and Niger. as well as developing a digital platform to disseminate reproductive health education and bring financial capabilities to adolescent girls in Uganda. It also developed a digital application to reinforce the management capacities of young people distributing digital financial services through a franchise model in rural Senegal.

In addition, the regional pilot of YouthStart reached 1 million youth (46% young women) with financial services and financial education; mobilized USD 24 million in savings from the youth; and gave UDS 43 million in loans to almost 300,000 young entrepreneurs.

Today YouthStarts goal is to continue to design, test and pilot sustainable models to build youth resilience in LDCs, to successfully navigate school-to-work transitions - accelerating the Sustainable Developmental Goal achievement.

READ MORE on YouthStart’s main activities and stories from the field.