Youth and Entrepreneurship

Today I made a couple of visits to a number of youth groups, my main reason being to talk to these youths in some part of Kakamega county on entrepreneurship. As we paced through the hurdles of the topic, I came to realize that most of us are not taking time to recognize the rare opportunities that present themselves with the currently set up hubs in most counties. You might want to ask, what a hub is! From my technopedia mind, a hub is sort of a communication set up framework that sends data packets to all devices on a network, regardless of any addresses contained in the data packet. So many county bosses have done a good job to publicize their counties’ rare opportunities and even put up facilities that over time attract potential investors to use in doing business, holding events or even carrying out personal and corporate activities; research hubs, tech hubs, information hubs, just to name a few. There is so much that the youth can pick out of this, especially with inter-global linkages, thanks to Kakamega county government where tides are changing with the present county-global linkages occurrences, whose main focus is on inviting investors even beyond borders to be part of our economic transition. What then we, the youths have to do is to put ourselves in the corridors of this transition. With the increasing interest from the western countries to capture the potentials in the country, slowly private developers are taking over our cities in the aim of milking such benefits when opportunities arise. With a fifty two years old in State house, I say the economic revolution is at sunrise, the age bracket for doing certain things is getting lower, and if you are reading this right now and you are at 50 and it doesn’t make sense to you, then woe unto you, you have been lapped, watch your pace man!

For the second term in history we have had a youthful government at our disposal but yet we fail to tap into its wide potentials, we leave the millennial run the show, not so. The Youth Enterprise has a number of programs launched but only a couple of youth visit this offices to ask for the services. For instance places like Shikhambi in Kakamega County, the youth are not aware of the functions of this office situated almost one kilometer away from their residences. Only a few claim to know this information, but they know very little and the little they know, they also don’t know it very well. Let’s not blame the current government for our failures vijana. Just because something is labeled as “loan” doesn’t mean we should shy away, this is to help us be accountable of the resources. I fail to understand why someone will work eight hours for pay and later that night spends the cash on “Girl Child” and irresponsible gambling! The government’s move to go digital has also proved that local artistes can get their stuff on air since these media houses are looking for entertainment to meet the local content policy. I am not pro Gov’t but truth be told, we have a number of opportunities as vijana, we need to keep trying!

While engaging the youth who had something to say about investment ideas in our meetings today, I noticed that we got so many skillful youth out there who can move mountains to get access to opportunities but we fail because of our brand, we fail to package ourselves to look better than millennial, we fail to show our competitive edge. Our dreams are scanty on the descriptive aspect of it. We think investment is all about cash and our expectations are cents centered. Let’s package and brand ourselves to attract many opportunities, we might have the brains and the ideas to execute but the fact that if we don’t look the type or are not consistent in seeking these goals then will always cry foul.
© Sabwa John Milton, 2018

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