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Fungayi Antony Sox Youth Interactive Correspondent

Fast-growing tech-centred digital platform Youth Opportunities Hub (YOH) has improved access to information on various opportunities be they jobs, educational or business prospects for young people across the continent.

YOH is a tech-centred entity responsible for posting and advertising youth related opportunities around the globe.

Gone are the ancient times when one had to go through the rigorous process of job hunting and university scholarship applications which entailed physical visits to work places and institutions and at times via postal methods–a tiring straining process which resulted in missed opportunities for many.

Established by a 31 year-old Zimbabwean tech entrepreneur Shingirayi Kondongwe back in 2020, the youth opportunities hub website has grown to become the centre of convergence for Africa’s young people with a growing reach now of over three million visitors from at least 100 countries each month.

“When I came back to Zimbabwe from the diaspora around March 2020, it just took me two months of my stay in the country to realize that not much was being done when it comes to the dissemination of information regarding youth opportunities. I realised that the problem we have today is getting information to young people, and that’s how Youth Opportunities Hub was born” said Kondongwe.

The quality of opportunities, most of which are benefiting young people striving to better their lives on a continent that is riddled with a very high cost of education and an equally high unemployment rate, has led the portal to be labelled a ‘goldmine for opportunities’.

Kondongwe has formulated strategic partnerships with various youth organisations who provide opportunities including educational scholarships, research grants, travel grants, workshops and business prospects.

One of the notable partnerships is that with South Africa’s largest youth organisation, SA Youth.

According to recent media reports, Kondongwe said the partnership with SA Youth will help in tracing impact of the website.

“In conjunction with SA Youth, we are developing a system of tracking progress and impact, for instance, which youths benefited from a training program or employment and how? This data will help us to understand the impact of our programs in the context of developing youth skills,” he said.

  Another notable YOH partnership is that with International University of Applied Sciences (IU) from Germany. 

This saw YOH spreading the information on IU’s mouth-watering offer for 80 percent scholarships to prospective students for all bachelor, masters, or MBA degrees. 

“The idea is to make education accessible to everyone who would like to grow on personal and professional level,” said Kondongwe.

“The nature of our partnership is to promote this offer through our website.” 

Kondongwe is also a fellow of the Tony Elumelu Foundation and the Graduate Study Programme — an initiative of the United Nations Geneva Office which selects young people with the intention on teaching them how different UN agencies work.

It is against the background of his wealth of experience in working with various international organisations and agencies including his recent experience with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) where he helped their country office in monitoring and evaluating country programmes that he has built a wealth of networks and this has probably aided him in scouting opportunities for young people with different parts of the globe.

Kondongwe is no stranger in contributing to innovation and sustainable solutions bedevilling Zimbabwe and beyond its borders. During his scholarship at the African Union Commission between 2018-2020, he conducted a thesis-centred research focused on solutions aimed at ending the power and energy crisis in Africa. His research’s objective was also to extract factors militating against renewable energy progression in Zimbabwe and he suggested that the country move to renewable energy solutions such as solar and he also suggested the establishment of a sovereign wealth fund to cater for new renewable energy projects and the decentralisation of power generation amongst others.

Through his Youth Opportunities Hub platform, hundreds of young people have shared their testimonies of benefiting from opportunities shared by the platform and it is indeed true that education and the internet equate to the new gold mines of opportunities in today’s world.

Opportunities on the platform can be accessed on www.youthopportunitieshub.com <http://www.youthopportunitieshub.com> or Youth Opportunities Hub.