YOCILAB NextGen Fellowship 2025: Applications Now Open

The YOCILAB NextGen Fellowship is a four-month leadership and innovation program designed specifically for young graduates and early-career professionals in Cameroon. This intensive fellowship creates a transformative pathway for participants to build employability skills, nurture entrepreneurial innovation, and grow as resilient leaders capable of driving meaningful change in their communities.

The program addresses a critical challenge facing young Africans today: the difficult transition from education to employment or enterprise. Across the continent, millions of talented young people complete their studies with dreams of building meaningful careers or businesses, yet many face significant barriers in making this transition successfully.

The Fellowship Journey

The YOCILAB NextGen Fellowship responds to this challenge by creating a comprehensive development experience that unfolds over four distinct phases, each designed to build upon the previous stage.

Phase One: Recruitment and Selection

The journey begins with an open call for applications across Cameroon. The selection process evaluates applicants based on their passion, potential, and demonstrated leadership drive. Forty fellows are carefully selected to join each cohort, ensuring a diverse and dynamic group of participants who can learn from one another’s experiences and perspectives.

Selected fellows contribute a commitment fee of 30,000 FCFA, with the program itself being 90% funded. This fee ensures participants are genuinely committed to the full fellowship experience while keeping the program accessible to talented young people regardless of their financial circumstances.

Phase Two: The Co-Creation Lab

The fellowship launches with an intensive one-week residential experience that brings all fellows together for the first time. This immersive Co-Creation Lab serves as the foundation for everything that follows, featuring leadership and innovation workshops, fireside conversations with successful entrepreneurs, executives, and innovators, group challenges and co-design sessions, and community-building activities that foster lasting connections among participants.

This residential week is designed to break down barriers, spark creativity, and establish the collaborative culture that will define the fellowship experience. Participants leave the Lab with new friendships, expanded perspectives, and a clear sense of the journey ahead.

Phase Three: Learning, Mentorship and Growth

Following the Co-Creation Lab, fellows engage in a structured three-month learning journey that combines multiple modes of development. Weekly masterclasses led by industry experts and global mentors provide cutting-edge insights into the skills and mindsets needed to thrive in today’s rapidly evolving world of work.

Fellows apply their learning through practical assignments and peer projects that mirror real-world contexts. Ongoing mentorship circles connect participants with experienced professionals and entrepreneurs who provide personalized guidance and support. Regular check-ins and reflection sessions help fellows integrate their learning, assess their progress, and stay grounded throughout this intensive growth period.

Phase Four: The Career and Impact Fair

The fellowship culminates in a Career and Impact Fair where fellows present their projects, ventures, or portfolios to a carefully curated audience of potential employers, investors, and strategic partners. This event creates tangible opportunities for internships, jobs, partnerships, and funding while celebrating the growth and achievements of the entire cohort.

The Fair is also open to the wider youth community, creating a ripple effect of inspiration and opportunity that extends beyond the fellowship participants themselves.

Core Focus Areas

The YOCILAB NextGen Fellowship combines learning, mentorship, and experiential practice across three interconnected focus areas, each essential for success in the modern economy.

Employability and the Future of Work

Fellows develop the competencies and mindset necessary to excel in 21st-century workplaces. This includes career development and personal branding strategies that help participants articulate their unique value proposition, digital skills and remote work readiness that are increasingly essential in a globalized economy, professional communication and collaboration techniques that enable effective teamwork, and a deep understanding of the future of work and emerging trends that are reshaping industries and creating new opportunities.

Entrepreneurship and Local Innovation

Participants learn how to design, test, and scale ideas that solve local problems and create value in their communities. The curriculum covers opportunity identification and market research methods that reveal unmet needs and viable business possibilities, business model design and value creation frameworks that transform ideas into sustainable ventures, innovation thinking and local problem-solving approaches that are contextually appropriate and culturally relevant, and practical guidance on accessing funding, investors, and markets that can help bring innovations to scale.

Resilience, Leadership and Well-being

Fellows strengthen their capacity to lead with purpose, manage stress, and stay grounded even in uncertain times. This dimension of the program emphasizes self-leadership and emotional intelligence as foundational capabilities for all other forms of leadership, adaptive leadership skills that enable participants to navigate ambiguity and complexity, team building and communication strategies that foster collaboration and trust, and mindfulness and personal well-being practices that support sustainable performance and authentic presence.

What Fellows Gain

By the end of the fellowship, participants will have gained critical employability and entrepreneurial skills that position them for success in diverse career paths. They develop clarity and confidence in their career journey, moving from uncertainty to purposeful action. Fellows connect directly with mentors, employers, and investors who can open doors and provide ongoing support. They gain access to the YOCILAB opportunity database containing over 1,500 opportunities updated monthly, including jobs, internships, scholarships, grants, and professional development programs.

Perhaps most importantly, fellows build resilience and leadership strength that will serve them throughout their lives, and they join a lifelong NextGen Alumni Network of changemakers who continue to learn, collaborate, and support one another long after the formal fellowship concludes.

Who Should Apply

The YOCILAB NextGen Fellowship seeks young Cameroonians who are ready to invest in their own development and committed to creating positive impact in their communities. To be eligible, applicants must be Cameroonian citizens between the ages of 18 and 30, either recent graduates or early-career professionals with a demonstrated passion for leadership, innovation, or social impact. Candidates must be available for the entire program duration and willing to commit the 30,000 FCFA fellowship fee if selected.

Application Process and Deadline

Applications for the 2025 cohort are due by December 5, 2025 at 11:59 PM West Africa Time. Prospective fellows should complete all required sections of the application carefully and thoughtfully. Applications that rely on artificial intelligence or are incomplete will not be considered. The selection process values authenticity, clarity of purpose, and genuine commitment to personal and community development.

All data submitted through the application will be treated with strict confidentiality and used solely for fellowship selection and program communication purposes.

A Collaborative Approach

The YOCILAB NextGen Fellowship is implemented by YOCILAB in collaboration with local and international partners, universities, and corporate organizations who share a commitment to empowering Africa’s next generation. The program welcomes partnerships with organizations that believe in the power of skills development, innovation, and leadership to transform lives and communities.

Join the Movement

The YOCILAB NextGen Fellowship represents more than just a professional development program. It is an invitation to join a growing movement of young leaders, innovators, and professionals who are actively shaping the future of work in Africa and driving positive change across industries and regions.

For young Cameroonians ready to take the next step in their journey, ready to develop the skills and mindset needed to thrive in an evolving economy, and ready to connect with a community of like-minded changemakers, the NextGen Fellowship offers a unique and transformative opportunity.

Applications close December 5, 2025.

For more information, visit www.yocilab.com/nextgen or contact [email protected].

Stay on opportunitiesforyouth.org for more opportunities.

Related