The Courage to Change Lives: How Going Beyond Youth Leaders are Reshaping the Futures of African Youth

When Mgalla Mgini began facilitating the Digital Business Program for young entrepreneurs in her community in Tanzania last year, she heard the same thing over and over. I can’t do that. For instance, when she explained how to market small businesses on social media, some of the young people in her cohort told her their businesses weren’t worth sharing on a public platform. “I’m just a person from a poor family selling vegetables on the street,” explained one woman. “It’s not something worth promoting.” 

Mgini led the training as part of the Going Beyond project, a five-year collaboration between Digital Opportunity Trust (DOT) and the Mastercard Foundation, empowering over 300,000 young entrepreneurs in Côte d’Ivoire, Malawi, Zambia, and Tanzania with digital and business skills training. The project operates on a peer-to-peer model, meaning young people from the target communities facilitate the training. As Mgini discovered, leadership doesn’t just mean standing at the front of the room imparting information about entrepreneurship. In a bigger sense, it is about changing how young Africans see their future. “It’s hard to change people’s minds, to get them out of their old ways of doing things,” she says. But when it happens, “the world opens to them.” 

Over the past several months, the world has opened to thousands of young entrepreneurs as a result of their participation in the Going Beyond project. Those transformations have been guided by a group of remarkable Youth Leaders like Mgini. They have imparted both knowledge and hope to their peers and, from that experience, found themselves changed as well. “I gained confidence and skills,” explains Agness Mhina, a Youth Leader in Tanzania. “When you are empowered yourself, that’s when you are in a position to empower others.” 

For many Youth Leaders, the core of their work was challenging old norms and helping young people around them widen the lens of their dreams. For example, Youth Leader Molly Kalinga from Malawi initially struggled to recruit young women to participate in her trainings, because men run most businesses in her area. Breaking down the stereotype that business was “men’s work” took concerted effort, she says. Kalinga spoke to husbands, fathers, and local leaders. She shared her own experience as a poultry farmer with potential female participants. “I empowered them to believe that women can do business too,” she explains. Ultimately, she recruited majority-female cohorts of participants, and their businesses flourished. One business grew so much after being part of the training that they hired two additional workers. “So now the whole community sees how this benefits them,” Kalinga says. Elsewhere, too, Youth Leaders spoke of seeing their peers transform into confident, knowledgeable entrepreneurs with expansive dreams for the future. “They put themselves out there, and it changed their lives,” says Moses Kepha, a Youth Leader from Tanzania. 

Helping their peers achieve their goals also changed the Youth Leaders’ perspectives on their own futures. Many realized for the first time that they could inspire those around them and change the course of their lives.  “We were dealing with people from rural communities, many were school dropouts. So classroom environments can be intimidating,” explains Bridget Litete, a Youth Leader in Malawi. She considers it one of the great accomplishments of her life to have created “a learning space where they felt knowledgeable and welcomed. They knew what they had to say mattered.” The experience left her thinking of herself, for the first time, “as someone who can lead, guide and serve.” Many other Youth Leaders experienced similar personal growth. “I learned a lot when it comes to resilience, confidence, and teamwork,” says Ian Sanga, a Youth Leader in Tanzania. “This experience has really built my character.” 

Meanwhile, the impacts of the Youth Leaders’ work reached beyond themselves and the young business owners they trained. It also rippled out into their communities, shattering stereotypes about young people and leaving an impression likely to go far beyond the project’s expiration date. Walters Lyimo, a Youth Leader in Tanzania with albinism, says he was proud to set an example “that someone with a disability can be a leader.” Rather than simply telling people that fact, he says, “I was showing it to them.” For Litete, the experience was exemplary of young people’s “courage to change their lives.” She says, “it was so inspiring for the community to see that young people here are hungry for more – hungry to learn and hungry to make an impact in the world.” 

Through our partners Hakizetu, Her Initiative, Sheria Kiganjani, Songambele, MHub, and Emerge Livelihoods the Going Beyond project empowered over 124 Youth Leaders to become changemakers, transforming the lives of more than 9,000 of their peers in Tanzania and Malawi in just four months. These young women and men not only delivered digital and business skills training but also inspired lasting change in their communities, proving that when youth take the lead, the impact will have a ripple effect.