Godfrey Mureriwa

In the face of Zimbabwe's contracting economy and declining public services, Godfrey Mureriwa is organizing and training young people to find their own solutions and create their own ventures in order to develop sustainable livelihoods.

Godfrey Mureriwa is building a national rural youth self-employment movement to redress the dramatic lack of job opportunities for Zimbabwe's dropouts. Of the approximately 300,000 youth leaving school each year, the formal economy is absorbing less than ten percent, most of these from among urban youth. Forty percent of the Zimbabwean population, which is mostly made up of educated young people, is unemployed. In the near total absence of government education or training programs, the overwhelming majority of rural youth are completely neglected and constitute a political time bomb quietly ticking toward detonation.
Godfrey's response to this growing crisis is the Zimbabwe Unemployment Youth Benefit Fund, the first private nonprofit rural youth employment program in the country. The Fund empowers young people by training them in job creation strategies, small enterprise management and job search skills. It also provides start-up loans below market rates using a variation on the Grameen Bank's peer collateral methodology.
The key to Godfrey's approach is that it reaches out to the youth while they are still in school and organizes them into local Fund chapters. It is the chapters that take responsibility for hosting training programs. While the Fund provides the curriculum and the trainers, the local chapters organize training venues and follow-up activities. Club members guarantee one another's start-up loans. "Because the young people own and manage their own chapters," says Godfrey, "the whole process of livelihood training and business start up depends upon youth initiative. The first lesson of the Fund is that you must take responsibility for your own livelihood."
In preparing the youth to start ventures, Godfrey orients them to consider the needs and opportunities within their own communities. What might they do in the way of a livelihood-creating venture that simultaneously addresses their community's social and economic problems? Starting a community nutrition garden will create employment and improve nutritional health. A small furniture carpentry shop in a village might meet local furniture needs while at the same time creating employment and thus reducing migration

Zimbabwe's economy is going through a protracted and painful "adjustment" in line with the strictures of the IMF and World Bank. As a consequence, the formal economy has been contracting and public-sector, human-service programs–from education to health to welfare to small business development–are in decline. In 1994 alone more than 50,000 agricultural and industrial workers lost their jobs. National estimates put the total unemployment figure at two million persons.

In this environment, new job seekers face grim prospects. In recent years the job market has been able to absorb only ten percent of the some 300,000 youths who annually enter the job market.

Unemployed youths, of course, fare the worse. Finding no off-farm employment and facing the most marginal possibilities as subsistence farmers, many young people flock to the larger cities in search of jobs. The influx of large numbers of people into the cities has led to overcrowding and associated ills, including increased crime, overburdened municipal services and a decline in public health. Rural communities are also impoverished by the rapid exodus of sons and daughters, losing both potential economic capacity and weakening family and social bonds.

The government has no effective rural economic policy, and the existing small business and other economic support programs are barely visible to rural youth. Youth have no expectation that the government or anyone else can generate a better future for them. They are increasingly alienated, angry and restive. The traditional passive support that the ZANU government has enjoyed from rural areas is reaching the point where it can no longer be taken for granted.

Godfrey operates along two tracks: a training and support program for youth self-employment; and a public education program that challenges Zimbabweans to consider and respond to the issue of youth unemployment.

The Zimbabwe Unemployment Youth Benefit Fund begins by establishing partnerships with secondary schools all over the country that join with the Fund to encourage youth nearing school-leaving age to establish chapters. The chapters host training programs that are taught by Fund trainers. The local chapters organize training venues and coordinate follow up activities that are facilitated by the Fund with technical advice and start-up loans. Godfrey's strategy is to get the youth to be the actual agents of change in their own lives from the outset of their interaction with the Fund. "After hosting the first training session, the youth have already got a feeling of accomplishment. We tell them that starting a business is no more complicated than running a workshop, although it requires a much greater commitment!"

The Fund provides ongoing training and support in basic business skills and protects the inspirational vision of youth initiative and self-employment through the tough times that are bound to come. Godfrey piloted the training and start-up loan support program for a year in the Takawira district before reaching out to schools across the country. The model involves a twelve-week course on business management. Next, the youth go back into the community to start group projects that benefit the community. These might be, for example, community bakeries, welding shops or poultry projects. The management of the projects are monitored and assessed in the field by Godfrey or a member of his team, who provide constant feedback. When the youth are judged ready to start a business venture, including the development of a business plan, then they are eligible for start-up capital from the Fund.

The Fund developed its "Credit Against Poverty" loan facility in partnership with the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. Fund members guarantee one another's start-up loans. They operate in peer groups of five. The groups of five are then organized into centers and these usually consist of up to 40 people. The use of peer group pressure acts as "loan collateral."

In an attempt to build links with critical foreign capital and technical support, Godfrey has connected each of these chapters to students in the United States. The American students help to raise funds for training costs and also provide information and reference materials to the chapters. These and other direct links to external resources forged by the Fund for the chapters are part of Godfrey's strategy to enable the chapters to become autonomous, self-supporting centers of rural livelihood promotion.

The second Fund program involves raising awareness in society about the youth unemployment crisis. Godfrey infiltrates the media with his message of youth self-employment and the cost to society of leaving the situation to fester. He is also seeking to mobilize citizen support for the Fund's work through fundraising events. His "Cycle for the Unemployed" was a huge success when it started in 1992, with volunteer bicyclists covering more than 2,000 kilometers and raising approximately $30,000 Zimbabwe dollars (U.S. $2,500) from more than 500 sponsors. This has since become a very successful annual event, and the Fund continues to explore additional ways to deepen the involvement of the volunteers and sponsors in its work.

The Fund now has a full-time staff of twenty people and continues to expand. It has assisted more than 3,000 youths in securing jobs, and more than 7,000 are involved in its employment creation activities. It has provided loans at market interest rates to more than 1,000 borrowers. Overall, the organization has a recorded membership of 25,000.

A former teacher, Godfrey has been an activist and community leader for much of his life. He values education highly and through dogged persistence managed to obtain enough support to complete a master's degree in "international community economic development" from New Hampshire College in the United States.

While in school, both locally and abroad, he began and led several clubs for his fellow students. In America, he launched the Assist International Association to help students from developing countries orient themselves to living and studying in the United States. This association operates today on several U.S. campuses and has helped scores of students settle during their period of study.

Godfrey left teaching to launch the Fund when he saw that most of his students, despite having applied themselves diligently at school, were unable to obtain employment. Realizing that in a very practical sense the education that he as a teacher was providing was of little benefit to the kids, he set about to devise a more meaningful kind of education.