Kisii University in collaboration with Sheffield Hallam University, Durban University of Technology, Ladoke Akintola University of Technology and Innovate Durban have been considered for Innovation for African Universities (IAU) grant from the British Council worth £60,000. In this project, the network seeks to address youth employability and job creation issues in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) through Carbon Literacy for Youth Employability and Job Creation (CL4YEJCP). In the immediate short term, the largest beneficiaries of CL4YEJCP will be the job seekers. The CL4YEJCP will create an awareness of carbon emission costs and impacts on everyday activities in a way that can be applied to any industry/sector. Designed in a way that not only potentially creates new job opportunities in our partner markets, the CL4YEJCP is designed to encourage regular self-reflection and innovative problem-solving skills and therefore provides students with both soft and tangible employability skills.

The project aims to innovatively tackle the severity of youth unemployment, disenfranchisement, and the lack of job creation capability for rapidly growing African populations, thus in envisioned to benefit several stakeholders who are currently negatively impacted by gaps between market demands and job seeker skills and abilities. For example, a major aim of the project is to localize and trans-create the Carbon Literacy materials and training into the appropriate ethnolinguistic contexts of our partnership network to maximise the project’s reach.Toachieve this, the partnership use our universities students and SSA languages specialists in the localization and transcreation process. This gives them experience and insight into the global language service industry where, although the market itself is estimated at over $50 billion worldwide, Africa shares only 0.05% of the market.

Through this project, the partners will realize their strategic aspiration to produce employable and entrepreneurially skilled graduates with higher potential to be well suited for the local and global job market and job creation. Moreover, the youths will gain an awareness of environmental and climate change issues including the carbon dioxide costs and impacts of everyday life activities, and the ability and motivation to reduce emissions, on an individual, community and organisational basis, in a way that can be applied to any industry or sector, as well as Green Innovation and Entrepreneurship opportunities.

The Kisii University team led by the Dean – School of Information Science and Technology, Dr. Mzee Awuor, includes Deputy Registrar – Resource Mobilization, Dr. Simion Omasaki, and Dr. Benard Maake, a lecturer in the Department of Computing Sciences seek to leverage Carbon Literacy to equip the youths with skills to engage in Green Innovation and Entrepreneurship ventures.

The project will run from October 2021 to September 2022.