Afghanistan and Central Asia

I ran across this article on the Motley Fool’s philanthropy site.  Here is the first sentence:

Across the world, a profound disaster is unfolding: Over the next 10 years, 1 billion young people in developing countries will be competing for about 300 million jobs.

Okay, so these are the choices: create businesses, hire people, or expect them to figure out an illicit business, or, expect them to starve.  Or, we could teach the next generation of entrepreneurs.  That is foolanthropy’s goal, and Mercy Corps has been granted money from foolanthropy to work in Kyrgyzstan.  According to a Mercy Corps press release, the program pairs high-school graduates with craftsmen such as metal-workers in order to teach skilled labor.   There is also a second program which concentrates upon fruit tree development on a community0wide basis in the Ferghana Valley.  A third program uses microfinance to help entrepreneurs develop businesses and jobs.

Further reading:
Mercy Corp’s report on their Ferghana Valley projects 

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 20th, 2007 at 1:37 pm and is filed under Kyrgyzstan, Economy, Children. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.