Entry Instance

HTTP 200 OK
Allow: GET, PUT, PATCH, DELETE, HEAD, OPTIONS
Content-Type: application/json
Vary: Accept

{
    "id": 287017,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/287017/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 273,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Dr. Otuoma",
    "speaker_title": "The Minister for Youth Affairs and Sports",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 132,
        "legal_name": "Paul Nyongesa Otuoma",
        "slug": "paul-otuoma"
    },
    "content": "One of the core mandates of the Fund was also to train young people in entrepreneurship and, so far, over 200,000 youths have been trained in entrepreneurial skills. The Fund has also partnered with the Ministry of Co-operative Development to assist the youth to form savings and credit societies (SACCOs). So far, the Fund has facilitated 24 youth SACCOs to be formed. The Fund has also supported two business plan competitions where over 10,000 youth have participated. The issue of labour migration in this country has also been in the media, especially the issue of Kenyan migrant workers being mistreated in other countries. The Fund has also developed a labour migration framework to guide young labour migration process and it is currently developing a Sessional Paper on youth employment scheme abroad to be approved by Parliament. Over 6,000 youth have benefited already from this endeavour to get jobs abroad. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, some of the new initiatives that have been put in place by the Fund include sector specific financing. This focuses on funding youth interested in doing business in specific sectors of the economy. The Fund is also partnering with experienced players in such fields by providing funds and financial support to identify players. Here, we have been collaborating with financial institutions, for instance, Equity Bank and others, to train youth in financial literacy and there is a target to train 1.3 million Kenyans in financial literacy through these kinds of programmes. There is also a direct funding programme that has been developed to enable youth to access big loans because the youth who already started with the enterprise have already built up their core enterprises and they need bigger financing than what was initially envisaged. Another such initiative is the credit guarantee scheme. We all know a lot of youth do not have collateral or land title deeds and the YEDF is partnering with financial institutions to provide that guarantee for the loan, of course, with products being developed. Another scheme that has been developed is partnership with the communities to be able to give information to the youths in the rural areas because we have also found that communication or information has not been reaching quite a number of youth in some of our rural areas. We have embarked on recruiting youth interns in every constituency to be able to give information to the youth and they are working together with the youth officers to reach out to our rural youth. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, despite all this, we have also faced a lot of challenges and one of them has been insufficient policy and legislative framework to support the growth of the youth enterprises and fund sustainability in conformity with the scale and complexity of the youth unemployment problem. The capital investment in providing non-credit services to the youth entrepreneurs is very heavy as we speak now. It is not just an issue of giving out loans. We must also put mechanisms in place to disburse these loans and to enable the youth to access markets. Another major challenge has been inadequate disbursement and repayment infrastructures in some parts of the country, particularly in remote areas which pose a major challenge to disbursement and loan repayment. I also want to highlight that one of the major partners that we have partnered with is the Kenya Union of Savings and Credit Cooperatives (KUSCO). The KUSCO is an umbrella body of very many SACCOs and because the Fund did not have the infrastructure to reach out all over the country, it was very important that we leverage with financial intermediaries that are able to reach out and one of them was KUSCO who applied to partner up with the YEDF and they succeeded by fulfilling all the requirements that were given. On that note, Kshs150 million was advanced to KUSCO---"
}