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{
    "id": 373036,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/373036/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 362,
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    "content": "Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker, I must say that the High Education Loans Board (HELB) has played a very key role because it gives loans to students to pay for their tuition and buy books. It has an elaborate system of recovering that money from the students when they are employed. I must also say that there is a good system in the entertainment industry, the hotel and catering levy systems, where the hotels pay a certain amount of money to a fund so that they can get good training for their staff. That is why, today, the hotel industry in Kenya is one of the best in the world. If you go to the good hotels in Kenya, the service and the treatment that you get and the quality of service is as good as in any other country. That is because we have the best training in the hotel industry. Many African countries bring their students here to learn how to take care of their hotel industries. That is because we have a good system in our catering industry. However, we have failed in our institutions such as polytechnics, technical training colleges and vocational training centres. We do not have a system that is well taken care of to train our technicians and students who are not able to make it to the university. We are not able to train them adequately. That is why there has been a lot of desperation in our middle class youth. There has been an increase in crime, drug and alcohol abuse. That is because there is a middle section of our society that we are not taking care of. They are desperate. They know there is something that they can do, but they are unable to do it. They know that if they could get money to pay for their tuition and to learn trades, they can be more useful. But they have been unable to do it and they do not know where to go. Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker, that way, we have contaminated the fuel and our rally car cannot move. We must put measures in place to make sure that we take care of middle class citizens; children who are not able to make it to the universities. We must find a way of helping them because, to industrialize, we will need them. We will need the technicians to attain Vision 2030. We shall need our masons and carpenters to build homes and industries. We shall need our electricians and electronic engineers if we have to make our Konza City a success. We need to have power men if we have to supply power to all the areas in our country, in order to attain the dream of Vision 2030. Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker, we shall need secretaries and computer operators, services that are not offered in our universities, but in our tertiary institutions. We shall have laboratory technicians, painters, mechanics and all those categories of people and we need to train them. If we do not do that, we shall continue to import toothpicks and match boxes. We shall continue to import everything that we need because we will not be able to produce them. Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker, the Industrial Training Act, Cap 237 as was amended 1978 gives a provision where an employer is supposed to pay a levy of Kshs50 for each employee in his institution and that money is put together in a fund known as Industrial Training Fund, which is used to reimburse employers who conduct training of either new employees or who pay for the training of employees in their organization to improve their skills. That fund has been there since 1978. Up to date, there are only 16,000 registered contributors; those are companies and employers who contribute to this"
}