Results suggest that there is a significant effort towards addressing the issues of youth unemployment in Kenya.
The government has received support from the private sector, Civil Society organizations and multilateral organizations.
This includes efforts towards creating favourable policies, supporting education and training, skills development and entrepreneurship.
In an interview with the Star on Tuesday Mbuki Mburu a public policy and youth development advocate said that the Kenya Kwanza government has also demonstrated efforts to invest and support previously marginalized sectors to create employment.
She added that some of the initiatives that the Kenya Kwanza government is focused on include the Talanta Hela initiative for creative, sports and creative economy technical committees to help in monetizing and creating employment for more young people.
In addition, the youth advocate noted that the Kenya Kwanza government has introduced the bureaucracy-free Hustler Fund that is facilitating access to capital for small and quick transactions.
“Those who can access the hustler fund kindly borrow and use it to change lives,” Mbuki said.
However, she said that the young people feel they are not involved in the engineering and implementation of government and stakeholder interventions.
“There are no regulatory frameworks in the informal employment sectors especially export labour exposing Kenyans to gruesome human rights violations,” she said.
She said that youth unemployment interventions are neither sustainable nor dignified.
She said short-term interventions provide quick political mileage adding that there is no deliberate institutionalization of meaningful mechanisms to fight youth unemployment.
Mbuki added that unemployment is facilitated by limited integration of government services and poor coordination by the Ministry of Labour on matters of youth employment.
She noted that youth civic awareness has greatly improved due to enhanced technology and digital access.
However, young people are civically disengaged, disinterested in current affairs and disconnected from national issues.
She said that this originates from University education, the student leadership elections, and generally the culture of higher learning institutions has stifled the importance of youth participation in civic and democratic processes.
Despite this, Youth are engaged in community matters but are not quite involved in electoral, party engagements, governance and leadership processes.
Mbuki said that a collaborative approach will be more critical moving forward to accelerate a bigger impact with the increasing youth population in the country.
She called on the government and its stakeholders to establish stronger trust by increasing intentionality, eliminating discrimination and making the system work for the digital generation.
“Engaging this fast-growing demographic will only become more challenging. Without sufficient civic education and access to funding or economic opportunities, young people will tend to feel more like outsiders in their own democracies, which fuels sentiments of frustration, unfairness and exclusion,” she said.
Mbeki told the Star that the research report was supported by the Norwegian Agency for Exchange Cooperation (NOREC).
Speaking during the launch of the research report, Youth Affairs, the arts and sports CS Ababu Namwamba lauded the youth advocate Mbuki Mburu for recognizing the monetization and capitalization of sports and the creativity to create employment for the young people as well as the blue economy.
The sports CS also pointed out that the report is loud on the lack of coordination and we are committed to facilitating and coordinating different sectors for a common outcome.
“ICT and digital economy is a key drive recognized in the report and the government is committed to executing the implementation of digital highway,” CS Namwamba added.
He revealed that stakeholders need to stop rehearsing the old things and accept that transactional governance is killing youth participation.
Namwamba challenged the Kenyan youths to adopt a higher ideal and a greater goal when choosing their leaders.
He affirmed that the ministry is available to recalibrate the approach to youth issues and is willing to hold a town hall meeting with youths.
He said Kenya has a deep enduring faith in the ability of young people and its sports ministry is committed to harnessing the demographic dividend and raising the bar of our own ideals.