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Emergency Trust Fund for Africa
News article12 October 2018

Ugandan Farida is a cook apprentice with a newly found entrepreneurial outlook on life: "I would like to start my own business"

Farida Zawadi in her cooking class

Hotels in Arua, in the West Nile region of Uganda, have been very busy in the last years, mostly because international and national humanitarian organisations have been setting up offices in this area due to the high influx of refugees from South Sudan. The Heritage Hotel is no different.

This is where 27-year-old Farida Zawadi is doing her apprenticeship – a system of training coupled with studies. Farida, a Ugandan national, dropped out of school in the Senior Three class because her elder brother, who had been paying her school fees since the death of their father, was no longer able to finance them.

Farida was out of school for five years and, in the meanwhile, she also had a son. “I have been helping to run my sister’s salon, and in turn I got money to pay for his school fees,” she says. In need of a full-time job, Farida enrolled in the apprenticeship program of the Centre for Governance and Economic Development (CEGED).

Farida’s trainer, Chef Johns Kafeero, who has been in the hotel business for 38 years, thinks apprenticeship is a strategic training mode for unemployed youth. “When a young person is trained from a workplace, they get first-hand experience. Besides learning how to prepare different foods and beverages, both hot and cold, they are exposed to customers and learn how to serve and meet their needs,” he says.

Farida is now able to cook different kinds of meals, including some that she had never made and some she had never even tasted. “I would like to go out and start my own catering business,” she says with an entrepreneurial outlook. “I do not have the money for this now, so I am first going to get a job, save my earnings and open my own business”, Farida adds.

Just like Farida, Lilian Yesco is also building a new future for herself and her siblings. Read her story here:

{"I want to make something of myself and to take care of my siblings"- Lilian, a 25-year-old apprentice baker from Uganda says}

Background

Farida is benefiting from the EUTF-funded Support to Refugees and Host Communities in Northern Uganda (SPRS-NU), which is funded through the European Union Emergency Trust Fund. The programme is run by Enabel, the Belgian development agency, and focuses on equipping youth, including women and girls, with skills that can allow them to get employment or start their own jobs. The programme not only seeks to change the livelihoods of refugees but also those Ugandans who live within and around the refugee settlements in Northern Uganda and Kiryandongo.

Details

Publication date
12 October 2018
Region and Country
Uganda
Thematic
Greater economic and employment opportunities
Partner
ENABEL - Belgian Development Agency

Programmes in the region