No other continent on Earth shares Africa’s potential. No other continent shares its challenges.
Established in 2014, the Chrysalis Youth Empowerment Network exists to support young African people and train them as changemakers, providing recreational and educational activities to enable them to have a positive impact on their communities.
Our goals are:
To prevent poverty in Africa, by providing grants, items and services to those in need, particularly through indigenous African organisations.
To promote children's rights.
To promote sustainable development in Africa.
We aim to enable young people in Uganda to become changemakers; training them to become social entrepreneurs and leave a lasting impact on their community, country, continent and the world.
How?
The Chrysalis Youth Empowerment Network’s (CYEN) African operations are based at the Chrysalis Centre in Kireka, Kampala, Uganda, located on edge of the Acholi Quarter. It's a small place, but it has hosted two youth conferences and runs activities as diverse as taekwon-do and watercolour painting, acrobatics and intellectual boardgames, and athletics the first Slum Run!
The centre is colourful and is designed to stimulate young people to think of a better future for themselves and their community. Many of the activities are run by the youth themselves, and experts are brought in to teach specialist sports or activities.
The Acholi Quarter is a slum district in Kampala and children there are generally poorly nourished, lacking in investment and often unable to go to school due to the prohibitive cost of school fees, let alone the activities presented at the Chrysalis Centre.
The Chrysalis Centre is the headquarters of the Butterfly Project for young social entrepreneurs and it is here where some young people are trained up to become changemakers.
In 2020 after many years of fund-raising and planning by CYEN, the Chrysalis Secondary School opened in Lagwe Dola in the north of Uganda, providing a centre for regional transformation and social entrepreneurship in Northern Uganda, built to encourage its students to see themselves as architects of change. Learn more about the school here
The Chrysalis Youth Empowerment Network has had an enormous impact in Uganda and has trained young people from all over the country and many of these are running activities in their own local communities, having been trained at the Chrysalis Centre. So, please consider this cause and support it, if you can.
““To live is to choose. But to choose well, you must know who you are and what you stand for, where you want to go and why you want to get there.”
— Kofi Annan, seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations
