Unlocking Youth Employment in Kenya’s Food and Beverage Sector: Mombasa County
GDI Africa is a locally run and independently-managed global partner organization with a shared vision and mission. GDI’s partners work together to build knowledge and capacity in our incubation services, and often collaborate in their support of initiatives. Our team comes from a variety of backgrounds with experience at top-tier public, private, non-profit, and philanthropic organizations. We share a track record of entrepreneurship, deep social sector experience, and a culture of turning talk into action.
The Global Opportunity Youth Network (GOYN) is a multi-stakeholder initiative hosted at The Aspen Institute and managed in partnership with GDI. GOYN is committed to catalyzing place-based systems shifts in communities — cities and rural districts — around the world through the creation of sustainable economic opportunities for “Opportunity Youth,” (OY) aged 15-29 who are out of school, unemployed or underemployed. Created in 2018, GOYN’s current network is comprised of 17 communities across India, Latin America, and Africa.
GOYN has been working on initiatives to help address youth unemployment in Kenya, and Mombasa in particular. Building on the initial works by GOYN and other stakeholders on youth empowerment Initiatives, we explore the potential of the Hospitality and Tourism Sector to create sustainable employment for the youths in Mombasa. Hospitality and Tourism has been identified as one of the employment growth enhancing sectors (GOYN, 2022; World Economic Forum, 2025). But it remains unknown what drives employment -the demand for jobs and skills- in the industry. We conducted a study to examine the demand for jobs and skills for the youth in Mombasa County, taking Food and Beverage sub-sector as an experiment, collecting multiple rounds of data from employers between the months of September 2024 to February 2025.
This report presents the findings and discussions of the first phase-employer mapping, which will facilitate the building of a database- of the Future of Work Program by Zizi Afrique Foundation (ZAF) and partners.