Our History
In December 2006, a group of young people from the Netherlands visited Sengerema, Tanzania, as volunteers in order to help young entrepreneurs write a business plan. They believed that supplying people with knowledge and insights on how to run a business would help them to improve their lives by creating a sustainable income with their own business. Every year they came back and trained new youth.
As a result of that, in 2008 a foundation in the Netherlands called “Sengerema Foundation” was established and we started supplying small loans in addition to business plan support. This because we believed that small financial support would allow these young entrepreneurs to realize their plans. Furthermore, the first graduate students were involved in a training program to teach a new group of entrepreneurs. Sengerema Foundation expanded its reach and to operate in a more sustainable way, the Tanzanian NGO YEP Tanzania (Youth Entrepreneurship Program) was founded. This NGO was started by students who called themselves the education committee from the Sengerema Young Entrepreneurs, an organization established in Sengerema. This committee is a fully Community Based Organization (CBO). From that moment, YEP Tanzania became the local implementing partner of the Sengerema Foundation.
Over the years our training program has developed and has been adapted to the needs of the youth who received a training. This resulted in the implementation of computer classes as well as special skill classes like bakery or negotiation skills, in addition to the original basic training. We believe that we are entrepreneurs ourselves as well, because we adapt our service offering year by year to the needs of our students and the new insights we gain through evaluation visits from our board members and students from the Netherlands.
Now, we have a strong team of role model YEP trainers and coaches, who are graduate students from the program and who have (had) their own business.
Our Youth Programs in 2013
Our Main Goal
creating income and employment for the underserved youth in Tanzania
YEP Mission
We have over 10 years of experience in running, organizing and implementing entrepreneurship programs in Tanzania.
- In the recent years we have been active in Sengerema, Meatu and Iringa.
- Currently (2022) we are running Sengerema Foundation projects in Misungwi and smaller programs/ activities in Rombo and Dodoma. We also are implementing an partner project in Arusha for TRIAS and the TCCIA of Arusha.
We have our own developed curriculum, which is partly online. The goal of this curriculum is to:
- Supply entrepreneurships training, with topics such as:
- basic bookkeeping, financial management, types of cost, wallets, loan management, margin and profit, canvas business model, marketing , client profiles and more
- Provide life skills training with topics as:
- tree of life, behavior changes, conflict solving , family management.
- Learn more about general entrepreneur related skills, like:
- contract management, negotiation , TRA (tax) and licenses.
After training is also important to have a proper business coaching methodology in place in order to accelerate businesses. And we have developed our coaching skills, which includes:
- Connecting entrepreneurs to their peers who are more experienced and can mentor them
- Help making financial forecasts for seasonal businesses
- Connecting entrepreneurs to finance providers in order to expand and / or professionalize their business.
- Improving promotion on social media
- Help formalize businesses by assisting them on getting business license and tax clearance.
- Through close follow-up achieved that at least 90% of the beneficiaries in the pool are keeping records and have good insight in their business.
- Help with product improvement
- Keep them motivated in times that business was low and they faced challenges
Sharing our experience and knowledge
We support other development organizations, like Elabs in Sengerema and Love in Action in Mwanza by supplying empowerment and entrepreneurship trainings when requested.