Giving youth the hope of quality jobs

The government has experimented with many youth empowerment models in its quest for a lasting solution to the problem of increasing youth employment, which is regarded as the single most important contributor to their engagement in crime and political violence.

The latest menu is to offer tax incentives to employers who engage apprentices under the Youth Training and Internship programmes.

The initiative targets 70,000 unemployed youth in the 15 to 29 age bracket, said Mr Henry Rotich, the Cabinet Secretary for the National Treasury, when he presented the 2017/18 Budget to Parliament last week.

Empowering youth with skills to improve their employability and opportunities has become a headache and will be more critical ahead of the August 8 elections.

The greatest threat to economic growth, peace and prosperity lies in the behaviour of a million youth who join the labour market every year. Indeed, the Budget addressed itself to this issue in a rather temperate tone by focusing on the theme of “creating jobs, and delivering a better life for all Kenyans”.

CREATED JOBS

Assuming, as Mr Rotich stated, the economy has created 2.3 million jobs since 2013, it implies over 800,000 youth are jobless.

Youth, mostly with a basic high school or college education, are roaming around living off their parents and relatives, or engaging in anti-social activities.

As if that is not frightening enough, research shows that four out of five youth are in informal jobs. An analysis by Boaz Munga and Eldah Onsumu — “The State of Youth Unemployment in Kenya” published by the Brookings Institution in August 2014 estimated that 84 per cent of employed youth in 2009 were in informal employment or “vulnerable jobs”.

Assuming this analysis, which was based on the 2009 census, holds relatively true, it would imply that over 1.95 million of the youth employed since 2013 are in vulnerable jobs in the informal sector.

YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT

The government’s Youth and Internship programme needs to address these broader dimensions of youth unemployment. The first is how employers will be compensated, and monitored to ensure transparency and accountability. This can be done through the tax incentive regulations.

The oversight should be air-tight to prevent it from becoming another scheme under which the government pays billions for goods and services never delivered or whose costs are inflated.

A second fundamental question is what will happen to youth after internship as it does not guarantee them jobs. One of the practical ways of engaging them is to help them get capital to start small enterprises.

But not all youth can be good entrepreneurs. Some will succeed while others, and these could be the majority, will fail. There is the bigger problem of the chronic wastage and mismanagement of youth support or empowerment opportunities — the wounds of the Kazi Kwa Vijana under the Kenya Youth Empowerment Programme, National Youth Service and the Youth Enterprise Development Fund are still fresh and painful.

The much more fundamental issue is how to ensure that youth get quality jobs. The success of empowerment initiatives is highly correlated with the performance of the key sectors, including agriculture, manufacturing, export, financial services, and technology.

GROW FASTER

The large enterprises in these sectors act as anchors to micro, small and medium businesses. While the Budget outlined the incentives to make the sectors grow faster, there are problems.

The manufacturing sector’s contribution to the national output or Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has stagnated at 10-11 per cent. The sector suffers from constraints, including high cost of doing business, low technology adoption and failure to respond to global market stimulus and competition.

Agriculture remains traditional, rain-dependent and has failed to evolve from production of basic commodities to value-added, more rewarding agribusiness. In fact, youth are largely not interested in agriculture because they do not see opportunities for making good returns.

Modernising manufacturing and agriculture, improving access to quality, longer term finance and engaging youth more in government contracts will make a more significant contribution to their empowerment.

It will transform them into contributors to the national cake and cut their dependence on manna that falls from heaven during election seasons and quickly dries up when political battles are over.

Mr Warutere is the principal associate at MA Consulting Group. [email protected]