Illustrative photo from Africa Reframed workshop in Gambia. Image by: Africa Reframed

Creative Entrepreneurship Training for Youth

Finn Church Aid developed its creative industry program further. The organization and its partners experimented with using an online platform Claned for learning.

Introduction

Digitalization is shaping working life at an increasing speed. Creative industries (e.g. TV, music and games) strive from digitalization. Importantly, many of the industry’s professional skills – such as graphic design or online content production – are transferable to a variety of jobs.

Hence, training youth with creative skills provides them with a wide range of job opportunities and due to digitalization, also without borders. These skills represent important skills in the future working life in general.

Finn Church Aid is developing a Creative Industries Program to create jobs, innovation and trade through creativity, entrepreneurship and digitalization. In this experiment, FCA and its partners developed their program further.

Results

FCA and its partners experimented with using an online platform Claned for learning. The organization built a “Creative Entrepreneurship and Work Skills” learning component on Claned and piloted how youth perceived it. 

Altogether, 15 students participated in the process. Besides the online learning component, FCA organized a face-to-face workshop and technical training on the basics of photography. These all received extremely good feedback from the participants.

There were some expected challenges in terms of connectivity and digital devices at the beginning of the online learning component. However, the team was able to overcome most and in the process, 93 % of the students reported their digital skills improved.

There’s a huge demand for training in creative work skills: 100 % of the students reported they want to attend more training in creative work skills in the future.

FCA partnered with NGO called Caring Hands and Ugandan media company Kalophonix to conduct the experiment. There are plans for future projects with both.

Scaling

The plan is to utilize the learning component – which was piloted during the experiment – in most of FCA’s creative industry training programs in the future. The team is looking for further funding with local partners. Some potential donors have already been identified.

Finn Church Aid: Creative Entrepreneurship Training for Youth (PDF)