Sought-Out Cities Arts, Skills, and Empowerment Initiative as an organization designed to provide relevant resources aimed at human capacity development and nation building, has delivered vocational skill trainings to at least 800 youths and women annually since it began in 2014.
These trainings have been our major project activity since we began, and they have been immensely impactful, as we have seen some of our beneficiaries begin their pursuits in their different skill areas. While some have used their training to increase capacity for higher opportunities in the job market, others have gone on to either begin a trade, or expand their ongoing businesses.
However, there is still a wide gap between those who have been able to transition from learning these skills to monetizing them. And this we have found to be due to lack of accessing financial support to help them start up or scale up their businesses. So with this in mind, we decided to channel more focus to solidifying the sustainability of the impact of our trainings by introducing this new phase of our program called UPGRADE.
UPGRADE is simply an IN-REACH business and inspire program for our beneficiaries to re-bond, celebrate achievements, look at their journeys so far, tackle the challenges that might have held them back in any way on their career or entrepreneurial journeys, while answering their questions, offering counselling and insight, and ultimately giving financial grants and support to some of them to help start up or scale up their entrepreneurial endeavours.
We held our first UPGRADE program on the 9th and 10th of August, 2019 at Patron Hotel where we had in attendance over 250 of our past beneficiaries from 2014 till date. It was an amazing program with lots of testimonials.
The program was proudly sponsored by First City Monument Bank and grants were given to some of our beneficiaries in attendance to help support their businesses.
