Venue: Washington, D.C.
Dates: September 29-30, 2009
Event Description:
As part of its efforts to build the youth enterprise, employment, and livelihood development field, Making Cents organized the first-ever Global Youth Microenterprise Conference, which took place in Washington, DC in September 2007. The response to this conference was tremendous, as evidenced by: 1) leading organizations in this field deciding to join the Global Advisory Committee in the early states of the conference’s development; 2) the conference being sold out 45 days in advance with 50 people remaining on the waiting list; and 3) a strong cross-sectoral representation of participants from 28 countries. At the event, the 270 participants shared lessons learned, promising practices, and innovative ideas for moving this field forward. It was the first global participatory learning event that specifically focused on the state of the youth enterprise, employment, and livelihood development field from the practitioner and funder perspectives, and it raised awareness on the importance of developing youth financial services. Participants reported they received significant value from attending, as the knowledge and new relationships they gained contributed directly to their programmatic objectives.
The information that emerged from the conference was synthesized and disseminated to the global community working on these issues via a publication titled, Youth Microenterprise and Livelihood Development: State of the Field. Which can be downloaded here. To date, this publication has been downloaded by over 600 people from more than 110 countries and read by an estimated 4,000 people around the world.
