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Kenya: Dispose of Youth Bill to Address Unemployment
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The East African Standard (Nairobi)
19 March 2008
Posted to the web 18 March 2008
E Gor Semelang'o
Nairobi
During President Kibaki's first address to the Tenth Parliament, the issue of establishing a National Youth Council and re-tabling of the Sessional Paper on an Employment Policy cropped up again.
The issues the Head of State raised must be considered more urgently in a post-election context.
The unprecedented violence that rocked the country at the beginning of the year was largely perpetrated by young people. This confirmed findings in a report from the Youth Policy dissemination workshops across the country.
The report entitled, 'Youth Unemployment: A Waiting Time Bomb' pointed out unemployment and underemployment among the youth as caused by myriad problems, including corruption, cumbersome bureaucracies, nepotism, patronage, one-man-two jobs and the experience factor among others.
There was clear indication that the creation of the Youth Fund necessitated mushrooming of many youth groups at grassroots levels. Ironically most of those groups never accessed the much-hyped fund, leaving them available for manipulation by politicians and their ready cash handouts. Some seem to have merged with others to form militia groups in various parts of the country.
The Youth Fund was conceived by the Government as a strategic move towards addressing youth unemployment. One of the main objectives of the fund was to provide loans to existing micro-finance institutions, non-governmental organisations and credit co-operatives for onlending to youth enterprises.
This objective should be changed to allow provision of loans to Youth Enterprises directly through the Youth Enterprise Development Fund Board as it is done with Higher Education Loans Board for university students. This will make the fund accessible to majority of young and potential entrepreneurs and avoid red tape bureaucracy and demand for collateral by financial intermediaries.
The constituency youth enterprises scheme (C-YES) that target youths in remote areas should be increased and channeled through the Constituency Development Fund CDF with key youth representatives being in charge.
The Ministry must change its focus and strategy to suit its core-clientele who are young people. The creation of the National Youth Council as envisioned by the policy deliberated by young people across the country is to, among other things, address the issue of youth representation at all levels, including active representation and management of the disbursement of Youth Fund instead of assigning the work to the financial intermediaries.
Applications should be channeled through the District Youth Officers as we wait for the devolved structures of the proposed National Youth Council. This will enhance the principle of ownership and popular participation.
The National Youth Council Steering Committee, a precursor to the National Youth Council, has the responsibility to ensure that the bill is passed into law, by lobbying Members of Parliament and popularising the youth policy.
The draft bill should include possible nomination of at least five top officials of the council to Parliament and other officials at grassroot level to various several civic authorities countrywide. This is necessary considering that no party nominated a young person to the august House.
When discussing unemployment at the mediated talks, young people must, therefore, be seen as key stakeholders. Women were right when they cried foul over the exclusion of their representation in the Kofi Annan-led talks because they are best placed to articulate their issues.
Similarly, the youth also know about their issues and are capable of articulating them if given opportunity. This denial of opportunity at crucial talks discussing matters of a particular interest group is undemocratic.
Political parties competing for power cannot assign themselves the business of speaking for the youth and women.
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The mainstreaming of youth issues in development process must take into account the youth popular participation. We must, therefore, address this issue as a matter of priority immediately after passing the National Accord and Reconciliation Bill 2008. The writer is the chairman of the National Youth Council Steering Committee
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