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{
"id": 1341328,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1341328/?format=api",
"text_counter": 598,
"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Thika Town, UDA",
"speaker_title": "Hon. Alice Ng'ang'a",
"speaker": null,
"content": " Thank you, Hon. Temporary Speaker. I rise to support and thank Hon. Gikaria for coming up with this amendment Bill. I represent the youth, women and people living with disabilities in the National Assembly. I also thank Hon. Sakaja, who is now a governor and is not with us, because he thought through this matter, and it has been working. The only problem that we have been experiencing, as mentioned by Hon. Gikaria, is start-up capital. As the Kenya Kwanza Government, we started with a hustler narrative and the Hustler Fund, giving hustlers amounts ranging from Ksh500 to Ksh50,000. We have now moved from that to businesses receiving Ksh5,000 to Ksh500,000. When a person is starting a business, and they have just finished university or college, you first tell them to register a company. Why do self-help groups for women and youths do very well? This is because they do not have many requirements for registration. Women thrive very well under the Uwezo Fund and the Women Enterprise Fund. They do not have many requirements. However, when they want to go a notch higher and engage in business with the Government, it becomes very challenging, especially when registering with the National Construction Authority (NCA). One does not only register for one unit. You start with civil matters, then roads and then water. You have to pay a certain amount of money for each category. Let me go on record that I recently called the Chief Executive Officer of the NCA. I told him that most companies were not thriving or doing very well because of the penalties or the amounts of money they asked for from those companies. If you started a company, registered with the NCA, and did not do any project that year, you would be penalised for the year you did not work. It becomes too much for that person to transact business using that company. The company continues lying there, gathering dust only because they do not have that money. However, if they are encouraged and told that once they register with the NCA, they can look for jobs in different sectors of the Government without paying any money and that the only requirement would be the company registration and clearance from the KRA, and then they would be good to go, that would encourage many women, youths and people living with disabilities. No amount of money will be required from them when they are looking for jobs. That is why I support Hon. Gikaria. We need to encourage innovative and creative young men and women to bring their creativity to the table. We have seen some who went to university to become engineers, but cannot be hired because there are no job opportunities or white-collar jobs. They can only be self-employed. We need to encourage them to start businesses because if they are water engineers, they will be very good at doing sewerage or water works. If they are civil engineers, they will be very good at construction. If they did other courses, they would be very good at supplying materials to different institutions. However, once we start asking them for more money, like the Ksh30,000 that has been mentioned, we will disadvantage them. Young men and young women are borrowing Ksh1,000 from the Hustler Fund to start businesses. We saw some of them in Kiambu the other day. They began with Ksh1,000 and used it to start second-hand handbag businesses. They are doing very well because they are receiving Ksh20,000 from the Government. What about those who already have a registered company and a certificate from the KRA? They are asking this The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for information purposesonly. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor."
}