Leonard Ncube — Young people in Victoria Falls marked the National Youth Day celebrations in style by launching a digital platform that will help create a database for all skilled and unskilled youth to be able to access opportunities.
The National Youth Day main celebrations were held at Mushagashe Vocational Training Centre in Masvingo on Wednesday last week where President Mnangagwa delivered the keynote address.
Thousands of youths from the country's 10 provinces attended the event under the theme: "Positioning Youth Empowerment and Development Towards Achieving Vision 2030".
Celebrated every February 21, the national holiday is the late former President Robert Mugabe's birthday and seeks to honour his legacy and encourage youths to adopt sound leadership values by emulating the ethos espoused by founding national leaders.
In Victoria Falls, a group of 31 youths used the day to launch Amathuba Skills Bank, a platform they initiated under Amathuba Creators, a company that has been registered to give services for events and entertainment, housing and property development and commercial communication to youths between the ages of 15 and 40 years in Victoria Falls.
Amathuba Creators was born as a brainchild of a local youth, Mr Glen Dumolwayo Ncube from Mkhosana suburb, who visited the only public library in the city. He failed to find what he wanted because of lack of internet services as the library only focuses on lending out old reading books. He saw the need to come up with a platform that could use artificial intelligence to address modern society needs.
Mr Ncube invited young people in Victoria Falls, but only 31 from Mkhosana showed interest and they registered Amathuba Creators, which gave birth to Amathuba Skill Bank that was launched on Wednesday.
They invited captains of industry and speakers were Mr Arnold Musonza, Mrs Barbara Murasiranwa-Hughes, Mr Thulani Nkala, Mr Elvis Zinyemba, Mr Brian Moyo and others. The motivation behind Amathuba Creators was to create opportunities and put them into existence.
In an interview after the launch, Amathuba chair Mr Funny Nyoni said they desired to work with the Government to identify opportunities for young people, create job opportunities for them and ensure they live in a safe space away from the life of drug and substance abuse and crime.
"This is a digital platform and web-based database, which embodies the spirit of innovation in which we are saying it is a testimony of resilience of young people of Victoria Falls and Zimbabwe in general," he said.
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"Amathuba Skills Bank seeks to leverage the various skills set of young people in Victoria Falls where they face a challenge of being sidelined and not easily identifiable to suitable employers."
Research had shown that some local youth had skills but were sidelined. The database would help close the gap and ensure people had job opportunities.
Young people would be expected to register with the organisation, which would capture their personal details, l qualifications and experience that would then be used to respond to opportunities from companies.
"We engaged companies and presented the product and told them we want to serve the community and reduce the hustle of recruitment processes and costs," he said.
"We want to bring convenience hence we have strategic partnership agreements with companies who will consider youths."
Subscribers would pay nominal monthly subscription to remain in the database and the money from subscriptions would be pooled into a youth rotational fund to empower young people.
Amathuba Skills Bank team leader Ms Nozipho Ndlovu said the digital platform wwould be visible to job seekers and employers.
"We want to help job seekers to find new role and companies to get skilled people. It has the job seekers, internship gateway, volunteers pass and networking segments where prospective employers and employees can access the portal," she said.
"Our job is to match what the employers want and what workers are looking for. Employers have indicated that the average Victoria Falls youth lack requisite skills hence we want to create a database of human resource in the youth category."
