“Growth has become my daily mantra” Ayikoru Zabib
Zabib Ayikoru, 25, is a beneficiary of our Skilling Youth for Increased Employability (SKY) Project. is a young woman from Arua City Oli Division and a beneficiary of the SKY Project. She runs businesses in the areas of crocheting, tailoring and soap making.She attended these youth skill trainings in 2022
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About the Skilling Youth for Increased Employability – SKY Project: The Community enterprise identification, development and management Program is a development program that seeks to offer market-driven training to the marginalized youth groups i.e. teenage mothers, out of school youth, street youth and the unemployed youth fraternity of Arua district and its surrounding communities. Under this program falls the Skilling Youth (SKY) for Increased Employability by December 2022 project. The development of this project is hinged on situational facts and statistics that reflect the lamentable plight of young people in the district and surrounding communities particularly in the face of and amidst the ravaging and scavenging COVID-19 pandemic. The objectives of the project were to increase out-of-school youth employability through foundational livelihood development and life skilling, to steer mindset, change for success in the labour market, and to enhance the survival and growth of youth self-start ups in Arua.
She was a drastically affected by the Covid 19 pandemic in 2020 where as a country, we underwent a lockdown for two years. During the lockdown, she was economically incapacitated. She closed her shop which at the time was not generating income. She spent all her savings to cater for her basic needs during the lock down including food, shelter, medical emergencies among others.
She applied for the SKY Project training and was selected to attend. At the time of the training, she was running her business from hand to mouth with no plans of growing her businesses. She says the SKY Project Entrepreneurship and Business Skills training was an eye opener to her. Firstly, the training taught her how to prepare a business plan. This guided her to start a soap (liquid and bar soap) and Vaseline making business that was an addition to other small businesses she was initially running.
The training on record keeping trained her on how to record transactions that occur in her businesses. She stated that she now has records of all her transactions. This has assisted her to keep track of her daily sales, profits and losses. She further stated that she is able to keep track on how her businesses are performing.
She mentioned that she was always using the profits from the business without thinking of the future of the businesses, however, from the SKY Training she learnt the culture of saving. She stated that she is now knowledgeable and wishes to grow her businesses into big businesses in West Nile.
The SKY project adopts a broad base approach to key entrepreneurial aspects including effective communication skills, basic concepts of entrepreneurship, business skills, developing of business plans, market study/analysis, customer identification, management and retention, sales and negotiation, price setting, profit calculations & debt management, budgeting, cash flow planning, business & record keeping, leadership & team building/networking, savings & investments, taxation and risk management among others. The project has a rich content that is customized into booklets to facilitate self-study at their convenience with a focus on effective and efficient enterprise set-up, management and survival. After active trainings, we move on to mentoring sessions to provide additional content and training on sustainability and scaling.
