employment services employment in the informal sector
Most of the youth and women who have education degrees below secondary education are not accepted in formal jobs. This is why AYB-SD offers informal employment opportunities through giving out micro and small loans. AYB-SD does not only offer loans, but it also focuses on the capacity building of micro and small entrepreneurs to be able to expand their enterprises, and thus be economically independent and graduate from the circle of poverty.
To get the loan, youth and women apply for the loan, where the Loans Program carries out social assessments and cross checking. Every month, AYB-SD selects a pool of micro and small entrepreneurs to receive the micro and small loans based on the assessments. Afterwards, the applicants receive pre-loans training to know how to construct feasibility studies and learn the principles of project management. Then, applicants are requested to submit feasibility studies as a pre-requisite to receiving the loan. This is followed by selecting the most realistic feasibility studies, and then loans are dispersed to the micro and small entrepreneurs selected.
AYB-SD does not stop at dispersing the loan, but it gives post-loan trainings including advanced project management, scaling-up techniques, and marketing consulting. AYB-SD helps entrepreneurs in solving enterprise problems through following up on their projects. As in the formal employment model, AYB-SD measures the impact of the loan on the beneficiaries including family and personal expenditure, and thus measures how people are graduating out of the circle of poverty after receiving the loans. The final impact of the loan is usually measured after two years of receiving the loan.
