The MasterCard Foundation and the CAP Youth Empowerment Institute in Kenya have announced a five-year, $10.5 million partnership to provide economically disadvantaged youth with the skills and support they need to access job opportunities or start a small business.

Building on the success of CAP YEI's Basic Employability Skills Training (BEST) model, the partnership will provide skills-training to twenty-three thousand Kenyan youth and help them secure employment and education opportunities. The program hopes to reach an additional thirty-nine thousand youth through partnerships with a hundred vocational training centers across the country and will support the efforts of four thousand youth to establish or grow microenterprises.

The first phase of the project was launched in 2011 and has provided more than nine thousand Kenyan youth with technical and life-skills. More than 88 percent of those young people transitioned to jobs, created small businesses, or enrolled in further education and training. The program also has helped build the capacity of forty-six vocational training centers by enabling them to apply the key principles of the BEST model to improve learning outcomes for an estimated fifty-eight hundred youth.

"This new partnership will contribute to a sustainable solution for youth employment in Kenya, reaching tens of thousands of youth with the critical skills they need to enter the workforce or start a small business," said Karen Moore, program manager of Youth Livelihoods at the MasterCard Foundation. "It will also support ongoing advancements of the technical and vocational education system in the country, expanding the reach of the program so that more youth have the opportunity to improve their livelihoods."