Avoiding flight, but how? Our answer: by creating job prospects.

©Sabab Lou

On today’s World Refugee Day, we would like to draw attention to how important it is to offer people on the ground a perspective: Vocational training enables a secure income and thus an independent life – without risking one’s own life on the flight to Europe.

Between 2014 and 2018 alone, around 35,000 young people left The Gambia for Europe. In addition to political reasons, it was the lack of job prospects that left them with no other option but to flee. In our Baddibu project, we also had to make the painful experience that 45 young people made their way to Europe illegally. Not all of them arrived.

For us, this was the trigger to create professional perspectives especially for the more than 150,000 unemployed young people in The Gambia. In our Gambian Youth Project, 80 young people have been receiving two-year, dual training for various professions in the agricultural sector since 2019. So that they can generate a sustainable income for themselves and their families.