Generation Unlimited (GenU) Ethiopia organized its first youth engagement workshop in Addis Ababa intending to engage the youth as an active changemaker of the society.

The workshop introduced the idea behind GenU and provided youth with a platform to voice their views, concerns and aspirations around issues affecting them. The participants helped to analyze the complexity of the challenges they face concerning their secondary education, skills development, school-to-work transitions, entrepreneurship and decent work. Moreover, they created a vision for a future to work towards by coming up with creative ideas to tackle these development challenges.

GenU also aims to build knowledge, identify and engage like-minded partners and undertake advocacy efforts for active investment in the growing young population.

Globally, Generation Unlimited was founded in September 2018 to transform and achieve positive results on education, employment and entrepreneurship for young people. It puts the youth at the centre of everything from co-creation of agendas to developing youth-focused innovative solutions and ongoing governance of the initiative.

Ethiopia, Argentina, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Rwanda and South Africa are some of the initially identified frontrunner countries to establish and operationalize GenU.

In Ethiopia, the Jobs Creation Commission (JCC) hosts GenU. The JCC is established under the Office of the Prime Minister to work on current macro policies and labour market to identify bottlenecks, challenges and root causes for employment, job creation, skills-gaps, and design interventions. It brought together partners with a shared agenda of investing in youth including UNDP, UNICEF and ILO.