UNDP South Sudan Accelerator Lab

We began with a challenge targeting youth unemployment and empowerment as a pathway towards sustainable peace and development.

The UNDP South Sudan Accelerator Lab's core challenge is targeting youth unemployment and empowerment as a cross-cutting pathway towards sustainable peace and development. The Lab is focused on the particular sub-sector of young, disenfranchised women informal traders. In Nimule, a borderland trading center, the Lab, in partnership with UK Research and Innovation provided financial literacy training to a group of 400 informal women traders. Trainings were held in conjunction with international banking partner Ecobank, who taught the women the benefits of financial principles in business. The Lab is now working in partnership on a cross-border pilot project with the UNDP Sudan Accelerator Lab. The initiative aims to expand on the financial literacy experiments and will be engaged with the Africa Borderland Centre. These partnerships and trainings provide vulnerable and under-resourced communities the tools to be able to trade with full knowledge of their rights as well as equipping them with literacy tools to grow their businesses.