On March 9 and 10, 2009, a planning meeting was held for the Rework the World meeting in India to be held in October 2009.

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Egypt

Rework in Tanzania – took place on May 7, 2009. Learn more about reworking energy, land, skills, finance

Tanzania

Regional Meeting in Pretoria

Regional meeting in Pretoria, South Africa, February 24, 2009:
“Promoting young entrepreneurs for the creation of green employment in Southern Africa”

Introduction
As part of the Rework the World initiative, a gathering of thirty participants in an explorative workshop took place in Pretoria on February 24. The specific aim of this meeting was to initiate constructive dialogues to identify the young entrepreneurs and promising programmes that can rework local business, and also explore how they can use the Rework the World effort for visibility and connections that can take these initiatives to regional and global levels.

Tällberg Foundation, in partnership with the South African Youth Movement and YES, organized this

Background

The opportunities for growth and transformation of entrepreneurial initiatives are set against an enormous environmental and development challenge. Global climate change and the financial crisis are presenting entirely new challenges to business and policy makers worldwide. Africa has been identified as the continent to be most severely affected by global climate change and South Africa is already experiencing the social challenges emanating from environmental stress in the region. Meanwhile, traditional development challenges – poverty, diseases, illiteracy – are still far from being adequately met. And millions of young people lack meaningful employment.

Innovative entrepreneurs are pushing initiatives that can create employment and sustainable livelihoods, but progress is too slow. Major barriers persist for growth of sustainable business models. There is therefore a great need for platforms where change-makers from widely different sectors can approach regulatory obstacles, knowledge gaps, and create the connections between investors, young entrepreneurs and policy-makers that can create a new kind of impact.

The Meeting

This one-day meeting brought together a group of 30 young entrepreneurs, youth leaders, as well as representatives of business and foundations, from 14 different countries.

The meeting, taking place at the Residency of the Swedish Ambassador, provided an opportunity for an informal and constructive conversation on the challenges of youth involvement as well as concrete steps to promote young entrepreneurs for a new direction of economic development in the region.

Following introductions of the Rework initiative and an analysis of the interrelatedness of the financial crisis with ongoing developmental challenges, the meeting split into smaller groups to explore specific initiatives in the region and how their contributions to a sustainable society could be scaled up and appropriately connected. The groups also discussed possibilities to build and enhance regional platforms or mechanisms to support youth driven initiatives.

Several opportunities to use the global Rework the World initiative and the 2010 Summit in Sweden as a spring-board for different initiatives were also explored.

The conversations were greatly enriched by the contributions from, among others, Alfred Sigudhla, Southern African Youth Movement, Prince Cedza Dlamini, Ubuntu Institute, Emmanuel Korbla Edudzie, YES Ghana, and Victoria Kajja, Uganda Girl Guides Association.

Following-up with the participants of this meeting, the ambition is to bring the most promising initiatives and partnerships from the region to the 2010 meeting in Sweden, and thus give them an opportunity to take them forward on a global level. There were also several links made between this meeting and the meeting in Tanzania May, 2009.