Projects

Youth Empowerment Program (YEP)

Youth Empowerment Program (YEP)

The goal of the program is to facilitate youth civic participation, interaction and capacity building of diverse stakeholders leading to an increased number of empowered rural youth in Moldova. Specifically, the program will facilitate Moldovan youth individuals, initiative groups and NGOs to act as agents of positive social change within their local/rural communities and constructively engage in non-partisan civic activities. For this purpose, the Institute for Rural Initiatives (iRi) will target and mobilize youth from a number of 30 rural areas with the objective of harnessing the energy, desire and potential of rural youth to improve their social, political and economic rights.

The project activities will focus at facilitating youth engagement in building competitive communities who recognize and tackle youth issues locally while providing quality services and opportunities for youth populations so that they want to stay home and build their communities.

During the implementation process, via the program’s activities, the project will provide beneficiary youth with knowledge, capacity and opportunities to:

  • Have their voices heard and participate in civil society processes.
  • Influence governance systems to be more responsive to the needs of rural youth.
  • Open up opportunities and processes to youth participation.
  • To engage more fully with their local governments.

Based on specific experience accumulated by iRi and its local partners in previous years, the proposed project will use a community-centered, goal-oriented, bottom-up approach utilizing diverse grassroots stakeholders to inspire a more robust civil society at the local level. In this sense the project will invest efforts in ensuring that the beneficiary youth and other relevant stakeholders have a hand in solving local problems of common interest that impact them directly + have a say in the on-going discussions at the local, regional and national levels about promoting change and empowerment for youth populations of Moldova.

The project is implemented by the Institute for Rural Initiatives in Moldova (iRi) in partnership with Great Lakes Community Action Partnership (GLCAP) with the financial support of the U.S. Department of State.

Press releases related to this project