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{
    "id": 94728,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/94728/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 215,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Ms. Ndeti",
    "speaker_title": "The Assistant Minister for Youth Affairs and Sports",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 109,
        "legal_name": "Wavinya Ndeti",
        "slug": "wavinya-ndeti"
    },
    "content": " Thank you, Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker. I would like to take this opportunity to support the Report. We, as a Ministry, will take this Report very seriously. We know you have put in a lot of work into it by going around the country and getting the views. Some of the views we have heard are very saddening. I can assure you, as a Ministry, we will be able to look into it and take into account most of the things that you have said. I would also want to say that the Government should not be blamed alone. Here, we have three people to blame. We have the parents, the Government and the church. The three have got to work together in order to make sure that our young children, young men and women are taken care of. We saw what happened during the constitutional referendum. We should now put all that behind us because the Constitution has passed and ensure that whatever is in the Constitution is implemented in order to help our young people. We, as the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports - I am the Assistant Minister in charge of the youth and I take some of the things that you have said here very seriously. But there are key issues that we as a whole; the parents, the Government and the church, should deal with. I want to thank God for the passage of the new Constitution because it has made education free and compulsory for every child; which means all of us will start at the same level. We are going to start on the same platform. I thank the people who supported the Constitution for that. The other thing I would want to talk about is training. We have to train our young people because we can educate them as indicated in the new Constitution. But we must also train them. This is also taken care of on the part of the youth. Once we train them, we must provide access to employment. How are we going to provide access to that employment? We, as a Government, should be able to work with our corporate world to ensure that once our children complete university education or get training, they get access to get work experience in those companies just like it happens in most of the countries in Europe. I studied in the United Kingdom and after we completed university, we were given two years to work in any company in the UK in order to get experience. The Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports is also working on that. We should create a partnership between us, the corporate world and the industries to ensure that our young children go into those companies and get experience. It is very difficult also to get employment without experience because when they go to ask for jobs, the first question they are asked is: Where were you working before? It is for us to ensure that they get the experience. In our Ministry, we also have youth polytechnics. The youth who have dropped out of schools are able to join our youth polytechnics. We used to call them village polytechnics, but we do not call them that anymore. They are youth polytechnics where we have a curriculum which enables our young people to go in stages and even go up to university level and get a degree. The Government is doing something about that. We are also giving a subsidy of Kshs15,000 per child in the youth polytechnics. I want to urge those ones who have not registered their youth polytechnics with the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports to come to the Ministry and register them. Let us encourage our young men and women to go there so that they get training or skills and also take advantage of that subsidy of Kshs15,000 per child. Let me comment on the Youth Enterprise Development Fund. We, as MPs, are getting money from the Government. I want to request my colleagues here to also help us in sourcing for more money because the money we have is not enough. The money is a drop in the ocean. If there is any Ministry that the Government needs to invest a lot of money in, it is the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports. If we have enough funds, we will be able to do that. So we should also look at the other Ministries and maybe reduce some budgets and try to push some of the monies, where it is not needed, into the this Ministry. I am sure most MPs will support me in that. The bottom line is that we need to invest in the youth by putting more money in the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports. We can stay here and talk about the youth until the kingdom comes but what are we doing about it? We want to thank the Government because we have a Ministry but this Ministry has got to be empowered more so that it can deal with the young people. We also have the National Youth Service (NYS). We take our young men and women between the age of 18 years and 23 years there. We train them on discipline and also give them courses to provide them with skills. When most of them complete training at the NYS they are taken into other forces like the Administration Police (AP), the military and the police. So, the Government is doing something about it. We just need support from everyone to ensure that whatever we are putting in place works properly. We also need support from the other Ministries so that they can take our young people. We also have youth development and youth training. This is to do with what I have told you about youth polytechnics. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, if we are going to make change in the lives of our young people and make sure they are not lost--- We have lost so many lives. These are people’s children. These children belong to mothers and fathers. Nobody wants to carry a child for nine months and then you lose that child because of people not taking up their responsibilities. We need to pay attention to our youth. We need to educate them. We need to train them and give them access to employment. The Constitution provides for all that. If you look around here, the Members who are here today are young. We need to work together. We need to push the agenda for the young people of this country to make sure that they do not go through what we have gone through. I beg to support."
}