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World Youth Skills Day is observed annually on 15 July to celebrate the strategic importance of equipping young people with skills for employment, decent work, and entrepreneurship.
It also highlights the role of young people in peacebuilding and conflict resolution, aiming to provide them with the necessary skills to contribute to a just, inclusive, and sustainable future for all. The theme for 2024 World Youth Skills Day is ‘Youth Skills for Peace and Development.'
Skills development is crucial for the future of work, social inclusion, and economic growth. It's about more than just technical training; it's about fostering creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving abilities. It's about empowering young people to become active participants in their communities and drivers of positive change.
How is Tullow supporting skills development?
Our Shared Prosperity ‘Accelerate Progress through Partnership’ strategy focusses on supporting enterprise, especially agribusiness, and enhancing employability, leading to job creation for young people. We develop youth skills to deliver on Tullow’s purpose to build a better future through responsible oil and gas development.
Over the years, Tullow has supported various initiatives that help build the capacity of youth within the communities where we work. These initiatives were mainly through education, particularly STEM skills, educational systems strengthening via teacher training, provision of scholarships at secondary and tertiary levels of education and the provision of educational infrastructure.
Going forward, our strategy for our socio-economic investments, accelerating progress through partnership focuses on building transferable skills and providing resources that create jobs and lead to employment and enabling a better future in which local communities and economies can thrive.
Our approach to projects is to align with national development and community priorities and we support young people in three key areas: transferable skills development, connecting youth to jobs and creating jobs.
1. Transferable skills development
Tullow has supported education, in particular STEM skills, teacher training and the provision of school infrastructure. In 2023:
- We supported over 10,000 young people to access education.
- We trained 150 teachers, supporting c. 8,000 students.
- We developed eight facilities, supporting 4,000 students to access education.
- 260 students transitioned to tertiary education.
- 153 students progressed to the world of work.
2. Connecting youth to jobs
Businesses face problems finding skilled employees because they lack transferable skills, ICT skills and mastery of new technologies remains unmet. Ghanaian employers complain of difficulty in filling positions due to a mismatch between qualifications and required skills.
Tullow, in partnership with Youth Bridge Foundation, launched Tullow Alumni Connect on 29 May 2024 to provide mentorship and job readiness skills support to Tullow scholarship beneficiaries, linking 300 young people to employment annually.
3. Creating jobs
Young people face additional constraints in accessing finance, and hence in starting their own business. This is especially true for youth who live in rural areas and for rural enterprises. Whether land is scarce or abundant, young people do not typically own it. For youth to participate in agricultural work, they need to have access to land. Youth who have limited access to land very often are also financially excluded. Less than 20% of young people in rural Africa have access to formal or informal finance.
Tullow, in collaboration with the Innohub Foundation, have developed the Tullow Agriventures Project to provide technical and business support alongside seed funding and working capital funding for 600 new and 30 existing businesses. The project will create 1,500 sustainable jobs over the next two years.
Tullow and OIC International are also providing financial literacy training and micro finance loans via the Fisherman’s Anchor Project.
Find out more about our approach to Shared Prosperity and Accelerating Progress through Partnerships here: Shared Prosperity | Tullow Oil plc (LSE: TLW)