The Girls Empowerment Network (GENET) is calling on young people and adolescent women in Mulanje and Thyolo to leverage resource mobilization skills to access a K100 million package under the new Constituency Development Fund (CDF).

"Building the capacity of youths in proposal writing and resource mobilization will enable them to collaborate with district councils and benefit from various funding windows including the CDF," said Charles Nyerere, GENET Project Coordinator.

Nyerere made the remarks Friday after a four-day skills training for 50 youths from Mulanje and Thyolo under the Adolescent Girls and Young Women initiative, funded by Global Fund through World Vision Malawi.

He said that now that funding issues are choking youth interventions, the skills will help the youth clubs to find ways of sustaining their activities.

Under the new K5 billion CDF, the government has set aside K100 million for the youths empowerment interventions in all the constituencies.

Meanwhile, Thyolo District Youth Officer Olga Mlambe said that the training is timely as most of the youths report funding challenges in the district.

"The training is critical for the youths to pitch convincing ideas to benefit from the constituency basket as most youth clubs struggle with funding for activities. Most of the times, they youth indicate in their reports that they have failed to implement activities owing to lack of funds," she said.

Martin Msondole from Mulanje Youth Organization said through the training, they are ready to mobilize resources for their activities.

"The training has equipped us with skills to plan ideas, develop business proposals, and generate income. We believe that it will not be difficult to access CDF funds and also utilize them effectively.

For the past two years, GENET has been implementing the HIV prevention interventions, this far reaching out to 66,000 AGYWs with various packages such as reproductive health Rights information, testing and provision of PrEP, link clients to service providers and Gender Based Violence (GBV) follow-ups.