ACHA- Innovation & Reconnection African Caribbean Heritage Alliance (ACHA) Project Summary:

On the basis of our African heritage, our project aims to provide interventions towards increased opportunities for youth through:

Arts and Culture: To uplift those suffering in silence due to limited access to social services. This will be done by linking urban youth with service providers and building understanding how to access resources. Furthermore, our project will create an enabling environment where the arts and culture through theperforming arts and educational entertainment will provide employment opportunities for talented youth to strengthen their skills, stage presence and performances in dance, music and artwork.

Sports: Sports for development has been evidenced to show positive advances in the early childhood development of youth. Sports will be used to bring together youth within the communities to interact with each by playing varying sports. The youth will be taught on how to compete ethically and nurture healthy competition habits.

Education-wise, the innovation will address the lack of educational wholesomeness in schools and communities whereby the current practice is strictly confinedto formal curriculum, making the society bereft of life building skills, recreation, entrepreneurship and knowledge about our heritage.

In financing, where youth are illiterate about financial planning and management which inhibits their ability to make proper investments, our project will train on holistic approaches to financial management balancing African heritage indigenous knowledge with modern concepts of banking, loans and savings. Our project will also train and strengthen skills in income generation, planning and overall financial management.

Entrepreneurship and Trade, where artists lack opportunities to expand their client networks and markets and talented youth lack training and performing spaces for their arts and sports, our project will ensure effective harnessing of these creative energies and to the extent feasible, sensitize and lobby for the integration of edutainment policies in the curriculum. This will contribute to gradual shift in mindset towards creative cultural industries and our beneficiaries could be eventually positioned to become employers of labour.


Our method is unique and addresses edutainment, awareness, employment, empowerment and effective use of performing spaces and sports facilities. Our project will empower indigent youth through the arts, sports and education to transform theirlives and other beneficiaries to speak out, organize themselves and acquire the necessary skills to sustain these new livelihoods.

The acquired skills can be demonstrated in conferences, seminars, workshops, show and tell and competitions. The confidence, self-awareness and assertiveness gained will help ensure duplication and thus sustainability of our project.

Ourproject will increase access to available information and resources and offer youth simple but effective ways of challenging issuesofviolence, abuse, marginalization and discrimination. We are certain the innovative learning alternatives from our project will give beneficiaries options towards informed decisions to break the culture of silence on issues that have become so pervasive in our society