Skip to main content

Money or Skills??

I would like to take this moment and appreciate the goodwill of His Excellence President Uhuru and his Deputy Vice President Ruto for proposing 6 billion worth of funds to women and youth.

What intrigues me though is whether youth need more money or more skills. Much as giving young people money to start a business so as to create jobs for themselves, is a great move, priority should be place on equipping them with skills that are needed to empower them in that business. 

From observation, it seems that most youth groups, are set up to take out loans because they are available to them, but fail in business, due to lack of cohesion within the group.Because the group was set up for the transaction process (getting the money) its almost impossible for them to make repayments of the loan. Of course not all youth groups go through this, they are some successful stories, but they seem the minority.

Kenya's youth need capacity building (skills), especially on the issue of business management skills. Fortunately, Startup Kenya Youth Trust, is not only about youth economic empowerment, but we also focus on capacity building, that include business ideas, business plans, financial literacy, marketing, and through mentor-ship providing capacity building in leadership, communication, record keeping, adherence to mention just a few. As stewards of the youth in Kenya, we are working towards bringing positive transformation.








Creating Economic Possibilities

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Differences between a Business Name (Sole-Proprietorship / Partnership) and a Limited Liability Company

While consulting for our online company registration service, Incorporator I find myself answering the question "What is the difference between a sole-proprietorship and a company?" Anybody who is considering starting a business must consider what type of business structure is needed for his or her particular situation. In Kenya there are three types of structures that one can use to start their business. 1. An LLC, or Limited Liability Company 2. A sole proprietorship 3. A Partnership A Sole-proprietorship and a Partnership are registered through the same manner (Form BN/2) with the exception that a partnership has more than one owner and although not necessary, entrepreneurs are advised to register a partnership deed as well. In this article all references to sole-proprietorship also include partnership. Understanding the advantages and disadvantages of each structure is important when deciding which one you want to use for your company.
15 comments
Read more

Cyber Cafe with an EDGE

Followed up from Laying the Groundwork for a rural cyber I've finally got around to writing this. Thanks for you all who patiently waited. Although I approached the project as an "internet consultant", I soon realised I would need to implement the whole spectrum of tasks required to get the cyber running. I spent almost a week laying the structured cabling, installing the software, and configuring the network. Most of the work I was doing for the first time (e.g. drilling holes in concrete to fix the trunking screws) and most of it was hard, but all of it was enjoyable. I needed to prove the project was implementable with minimal human resources (if it was going to work elsewhere). With an eye on both troubleshooting by the owner and future projects I prepared detailed How To manuals for most of the tasks. So the day finally arrived, November 17th I connected all the PCs to the internet. The results were incredible, the speeds were nearly as good as my 256K broadband conn
36 comments
Read more

Selling stuff online to Kenyans

You might not know this but my love of entrepreneurship is fuelled majorly by my love of computer programming. My first exposure to computers was in 1988 when I played shuffleboard on an Atari. Having been raised in the boondocks I was utterly spellbound with the concept of a video game. In 'shags' we hardly ever got toys from the shops; instead we would create our own toys using locally available material. For toy cars we twisted and shaped wire coat hangers and cut out rubber tires from old (and sometimes mom's new) bathroom slippers. For planes, we stuck a stalk of grass through a dried maize leaf and made our 'propellers' rotate by holding them out in front and running into the wind (incidentally this was my all-time favourite). For marbles we hunted for used and discarded bottle-tops (beer bottle-tops were coveted). In fact we had so many toys that our game time never felt inadequate. That was until I discovered video games. Hard as I thought I didn't see
21 comments
Read more