From skills to startups: mobilising diaspora for youth entrepreneurship in Sulaymaniyah
Sulaymaniyah Governorate faces persistent youth unemployment and underemployment, particularly among graduates and young people, despite relatively high education levels and strong social capital. Women’s labour force participation remains especially low at 18.6%, compared with 74.5% for men, and the employment-to-population ratio stands at 13.5% for women versus 68.5% for men. At the same time, the region holds significant untapped potential: a strong cultural identity, expanding creative and agricultural sectors and emerging opportunities in digital and remote work, all of which could support youth-led entrepreneurship if accompanied by practical, locally adapted support.
The project aims to respond to these needs and strengthen coordination by introducing the “Youth Impact – Entrepreneurship Programme” (YIEP). This programme connects skills development, entrepreneurship support, and employment pathways, shifting from stand-alone activities to a structured and repeatable model with clear institutional ownership at the governorate level. It complements government policies such as Iraq’s National Employment Policy, which focuses on youth labour market integration and school-to-work transitions, as well as the National Youth Vision 2030 and the Kurdistan Region Vision 2030, which emphasise economic reform and youth inclusion.
Diaspora engagement represents a further strategic opportunity, as Kurdish diaspora communities bring valuable expertise and international networks. Research on Kurdish diasporas in Europe highlights the presence of long-established and well-organised communities across several EU countries, characterised by dense formal and informal networks that can support knowledge exchange and collaboration. The project capitalises on these networks and will be implemented with diaspora expertise.
Programme of activities
Under this activity, a diaspora expert will gather insights to inform the subsequent development of the YIEP, ensuring it builds on existing practice and avoids common design and implementation pitfalls. This will be achieved by combining desk‑based benchmarking with structured peer exchanges for the Governorate’s and related institutions' teams.
This activity focuses on developing an implementable programme model tailored to unemployed youth in Sulaymaniyah, with explicit inclusion of young women and structured leverage of Kurdish-Iraqi diaspora expertise. It also establishes the coordination mechanism required to sustain collaboration across public institutions, universities and ecosystem actors, addressing current fragmentation and enabling institutional ownership by the Governorate of Sulaymaniyah.
The objective of this activity is to test and validate small pilot initiatives that show how young people can access real opportunities. The pilot initiatives will cover opportunities in key sectors such as culture, agriculture and artificial intelligence and will be led by diaspora experts. The activity will strengthen coordination between institutions involved in the organisation, and engage diaspora in practical roles. It will as a result generate lessons to improve the YIEP before scale-up.
This activity focuses on ensuring proper handover of project outputs and alignment on achievement of project objectives, with EUDiF coordinating the closure process and the Governorate validating results and next steps.