National Youth Day tomorrow is an important occasion that allows a lot of attention to be centred on the youth, their accomplishments and their needs, which is why under the Second Republic from 2018, it has been a public holiday and national event, rather than just a party political event.
The national nature of the modern celebrations is necessary as a lot needs to be recognised and a lot of policy needs to be woven to ensure that young people get a fair deal as they build their lives and, in so doing, automatically build the nation as well.
The centre of the national celebrations this year is the Mushagashe Vocational Training Centre in Masvingo Province, and that choice goes beyond the need to rotate national celebrations around the country.
Vocational colleges need to be recognised as a central element in the building of skills many people need to earn a decent living.
A lot of attention is paid to the universities and technical colleges, and the reforms in that sector during the Second Republic to make this area of formal education more relevant to those who moved through these colleges, and to ensure that they can combine theory and practice on graduation, are important.
But only a minority get the opportunity of that formal education with its rigorous entry requirements. For the majority of school leavers there has to be something a lot better than just being expected to cope.
They too deserve, as well as need, training in the skills they will use as they earn their living, and that living needs to be a decent living, with a decent income.
This is where the vocational training centres come in, a fairly modern concept that needs to be expanded and made accessible to all; even those destined for PhD research may well require courses and training in practical skills.
We probably need a lot more, including in urban areas, and we probably need to widen the range of courses.
A lot has been spoken about rural industrialisation, and this is happening. While agriculture is still the largest sector in the Zimbabwean economy in terms of the number of households living on farms, it now provides the prime means of support for just 30 percent of households, so even in rural areas farmers form a bare majority.
This is natural since as farmers become more productive and earn more money, the numbers of rural dwellers at both ends of a farming economy, the service providers and the processors of farm produce, grow fast, and those people need access to skills training so they can set up their businesses to support farmers and to process their crops.
At the same time that growing community of non-farming rural dwellers create their own need for support services.
Urban areas have the large numbers in factories and formal retailing, administration and the like, but again growing percentages will be in service industry and many will be younger people running their own small businesses, so again a very wide range of skills is required.
The other area of empowerment, one of the major aspects of tomorrow's National Youth Day, is of course access to finance once they have built up their skills and have some good ideas.
Even a plumber or electrician or a builder on a bicycle needs a toolbox, and once you are into industrial activity then more equipment is required, everything from welding sets to the power tools an efficient carpenter must have.
Youths bring this up continuously. The requirements for a young person with the necessary skills, a willingness to work hard, and some good ideas are not large, and some can get this assistance from their better-off families.
But most do not have a better-off family and so need to be able to borrow at easy interest rates, the minimum they require to get going.
Once they are established then loan finance is a lot easier, since they have a track record. The problem is getting started without that track record, just the skills and the ideas. Failure rates are higher at this level as well, which makes things that little bit harder.
But it is a problem that we need to solve. Young people starting out have 40 plus years of earning a living before them, and during those years they will automatically add a lot of value to the economy if they are fully occupied in self-employment or are employed.
Sitting around is not adding value and so we need to work out ways of making sure that they are working hard.
Some of their enterprises might never get very big, but will still provide a living. Some will grow into medium and then large companies. Every business started off small.
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We have a lot of the basics in place: the reformed higher formal education, the growing numbers in the chain of vocational training colleges, the Empowerment Bank and other sources of funding.
But we need to work out how to step up the pace and include more and more of our youth.
Our national policy has to work out how to get the required skills to everyone, with no one left behind, and then be able to offer them at least basic support to move forward.
This is how all economies grow. Economists look at the bigger picture, but that picture is made up of millions of people doing something, and the economy grows the fastest when those millions are doing something productive, each trying to earn a living and not really caring much about the big picture, but they form it.
So it is right that on National Youth Day we take time to look at what we are doing, what we need to do and how we can bring all our youth into full production in an ever-growing economy.
