DOT Tanzania, Enabel implementing partner in the Inclu-cities project, has kicked off its first training of community youth digital ambassadors, branded Digital Balozis. The cohort consisted of 10 youths. They have been equipped with the digital, soft, financial, and green skills needed to navigate and address their daily challenges, including adapting to and mitigating climate change, embarking on new career paths, starting small businesses, participating in civil society, or designing solutions to community challenges. After their training, Digital Balozi will go for community deployment from July to December 2025. In their deployment, they will provide SMEs with essential business and digital skills, business digitization and market linkages.  Their work will foster scalable and commercially viable businesses that drive job creation, address local challenges, and strengthen regional economies. Inclu-cities’ Digital Balozi program is designed to put youth at the center of community change by equipping youth and women entrepreneurs who run micro or small businesses in Mwanza, Tanga, and Pemba with basic digital, green, and financial literacy skills. In the Digital Balozis program, the Inclu-cities project leverages, DOT’s youth-led model, rooted in a proven assumption that by transforming the individual, the individual can transform their society. Overall the Digital Balozi’s will impact at least 300 young women and men, aged 18 to 35 years who own and operate micro and small businesses in their communities in transforming and scaling their enterprises through digital and green innovation in Mwanza, Pemba, and Tanga. Global research has shown that youth peer-to-peer training approaches are more effective because they reduce age-related hierarchy in the learning environment, as they allow young people to learn from those who are socially more similar to them Through this peer-to-peer model, youth become catalysts of change in their community - creating a ripple effect, whereby through sharing knowledge and skills with, and building confidence among their peers, families, and communities at large, one youth’s actions creates and gains momentum leading to widespread behaviour change.  ends 

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