A youth-led skilling intervention with North-East weavers.
In Dimapur, Nagaland — building loom-side mentoring and enterprise fundamentals alongside a generation that is choosing to stay.
Project brief
GAME (Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship) and Youth Net brought us into a project that was, at heart, about choice. Could young weavers in Dimapur build an enterprise at home that was as compelling as the call to leave for the city? Our role was to design the bridge — the curriculum, the mentor pipeline, and the first three buyer conversations.
We trained twelve local youth as peer mentors, who in turn trained eighty-five weavers across two cohorts. The curriculum was deliberately short — six modules, six weeks — focused on the smallest set of skills that move a product from loom to invoice.
"We did not need to be told our craft was good. We needed someone to show us the next room." — a Youth Net mentor.
The cohort closed with a small showcase in Dimapur, a costed catalogue, and a shared spreadsheet of buyer contacts in Delhi, Bengaluru and Guwahati. The work continues — Youth Net now runs the mentor programme on its own, and our role has stepped back to design review and occasional buyer introductions.
Photographs from the project.
Real photographs will replace these placeholders in the next phase.