By Saio Marrah
Through support from UNICEF, Restless Development has supported five adolescent female groups from different communities in the Western Area with grants following a pitching competition of innovative ideas aimed at addressing challenges facing their communities.
Restless Development’s Programme Coordinator, Hezina Johnson said the project Upshift is a social innovation programme that seeks to empower young people with skills and knowledge to be able to identify problems within their communities that they can proffer entrepreneurial solutions to.
Johnson said they want to empower young girls to take up leadership roles in developing their communities. “We want to create a generation of change makers by this I mean we want to see young girls are able to identify the problems within their communities and bringing solutions to that,” she said.
She said they trained the teams on how to build on their product or service that they want to undertake in their communities with the groups being supported through workshops and mentorship. In her PowerPoint presentation, she said Upshift had two phases, stakeholder mapping and designing. Each group made a PowerPoint presentation in which they highlighted the problems they want to solve in the communities that have created negative impact.
The programme is targeting 250 adolescent girls. The team from Fullah town, with a water project presentation, took first position whilst Tree-Planting snatched second position with a garbage disposal project. Wilberforce, Allentown and Regent were third, fourth and fifth respectively.
Sara Cassandra Kabba, Team Lead from the Fullah town community said she was excited that they took the first position. She pleaded for UNICEF and Restless Development to continue with such supportive programmes.”I would say thank you first of all to them and I hope they will continue doing this good work because it means a lot to us,” she said.
Mary Favour Mokuwa, the team lead for the Tree-Planting Community noted that garbage disposal has been one of the greatest challenges of the community and that with the grant they have been given, they will be able to buy trashcans and place them along various points within the community for people to deposit their trash, for which resident will pay the sum of Le 1,000. She added that the money will then be used to sustain the project. She thanked UNICEF and Restless Development for their support and pleaded that they continue the support.
Tanya Phiri, the youth innovation officer at UNICEF said UNICEF works in Sierra Leone to improve the lives of children and adolescents. She said most marginalized young people are girls, the reason which she said Upshift is focusing on the young girls. She was hopeful that the programme will help them with the skills that they can use to solve issues in their communities.
The Assistant Director, Ministry of Youth Affairs, Nuwoma Kelvin Mustapha, speaking on behalf of government, praised UNICEF and Restless Development for their good work and promised that their grant won’t go in vain.
Restless Development is a youth led organisation that has been in operation in Sierra Leone since 2005.
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