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{
    "id": 472214,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/472214/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 189,
    "type": "other",
    "speaker_name": "",
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    "speaker": null,
    "content": "The other challenge is the issue of financial illiteracy. There are many youth who would want to go into business. Therefore, they wish to procure goods and services from the Government, but they are financially illiterate. You will find that in the rural areas, if you give a cheque to a youth who has supplied his goods, that youth will be hesitant. This is partly because of the bad history of cheques; both individual and even Government cheques have been bouncing. I hope that as the Government starts giving our youth these cheques, they must not bounce the way they sometimes do. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, further to that education on finance that we need to give our youth, we should be alive to the fact that the youth have seen their parents who go and borrow money from micro finance institutions being auctioned and so they fear. They think that taking a loan is tantamount to being auctioned at the end of the day. These are the issues that we must give our children by way of education. The other challenge that these youth will face is actually access to credit. As we debated early in the afternoon, credit is not cheap in this country. I was not satisfied that the Government was telling us this afternoon that they can do nothing about the 19 per cent or 23 per cent interest rate being charged by banks. Something must be done so that these high interest rates can go down for our children to access cheap money for them to then be able to fund whatever tenders that they are going to win. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, now that Uwezo funds are starting to be rolled out, again, let me laud the Government for making this money available. It is my belief that these funds will initiate our youth into business. Once the youth have done that internship using the Uwezo funds as seed money, it will be possible for them to then carry that culture of business years and years into the future. However, if these Uwezo funds will be treated the way the Youth Enterprise Development Funds (YEDF) were treated or the way the Women Enterprise Funds (WEF) were treated, we will not go very far because there is serious red tape and serious bureaucracy connected to the funds that I have said. I hope the model of Uwezo funds will make it easy for our children to access this money. Since I am talking about this, may I comment about the Uwezo Fund. Uwezo Fund is no different to a large extent from the Constituencies Development Fund (CDF). This Senate must lead the country in ensuring that legislators, be they Senators, Members of the National Assembly or Members of the County Assemblies (MCAs), have nothing to do with controlling funds whatsoever. All the money under the CDF, Uwezo Fund, WEF and the YEDF should go to the Governor. He should be the one who dishes out the money and we oversight him properly, so that the process is neat. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, at the moment, it is so appalling that already people are rolling out ward enterprise funds, which operate like the CDF, completely with no law in place to govern them. On the ground now, some MCAs are walking with pre-printed Bills of Quantities (BQs). They sit at a shopping centre with a pre-printed BQ and say: “If you pay upfront, I will be able to give you this contract.” If you noticed, The Standard newspaper today has written an editorial saying that the Senators are fighting for CDF. I am expecting that the Office of the Speaker of the Senate will rebut this issue and make it clear that we were talking about resources to run the office of the Senator and not to go and do development. Even if you give me Kshs100 million or Kshs500 million with 12 constituencies, I will have no impact. So, I would The electronic version of the Senate Hansard Report is for information purposes only. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor, Senate."
}