Project Empowered is a project by the Carrington Youth Fellowship’s Economic Empowerment Team 2016. It seeks to address the challenges of youth employment in Makoko (A Riverine Community) in Nigeria. Makoko is a six distinct “villages” spread across land and water: Oko Agbon, Adogbo, Migbewhe, Yanshiwhe, Sogunro and Appolo. The first four are the floating communities known as “Makoko on water”; th
e rest are based on land. Though the community has a rich history in aquatic trading, it is a slum settlement with an estimated population of between 150,000 to 250,000 residents completely adapted for life on water, and whose economic activities revolve around the use of water, predominantly for fishing, fish-smoking and boat making (The Guardian, 2015). Life in Makoko is synonymous with struggle and resilience as it receives very limited government presence in terms of basic infrastructures and amenities. Youths and other residents living in the area face the challenges of power outage which has affected businesses, lack of portable drinking water, sanitary problems and overcrowding due to the fact that accommodation is cheap. The settlement has become a place where police and other law enforcement agents tread carefully because of the rising number of gangs in the community majority of who are youths. Project Empowered mission is to address the significant problem of unemployed or unengaged youths in Makoko community. The project aims to improve the civic engagement of disadvantaged youths through the provision of training in business development and management, life skills, such as fish processing, photography and film, and entrepreneurship with the objective of helping them realize their potentials, and prepare them to be productive, engaged and happy youth free from poverty.
