To empower the youth, address root causes of their major challenges

Senator Johnson Sakaja during the Kenya Young Parliamentarians end of year party at Dave Gardens

One of the greatest paradoxes of democratic politics is the discordance between demographic strength and political representation. This is evident in Kenya where the demographic majority, usually the youth and women, are the least represented politically, and the worst marginalised socially and economically.

With this reality, the Constitution has set out to offer remedy through provisions such as articles 55 and 100, which speak to the empowerment of these marginalised groups.

Addressing the challenges facing the youth is a priority of the national and county governments as well as non-governmental organisations. Some of these institutions have rolled out a series of youth-specific programmes.

These initiatives include creating funds to boost youth enterprises and offering young people training opportunities to equip them with skills crucial in the job market.

The government has also promised to focus on creating jobs for the youth. With this multiplicity of initiatives, one would expect the youth are doing fine. Yet this is far from the case. The youth are still confronted with hurdles such as unemployment, drug abuse and poverty. 

DISJOINTED

Where are we not getting it right? One of the setbacks in efforts to turn around the fortunes of the youth is failure to adequately implement the existing laws.

 Through the Kenya Young Parliamentarians Association (KYPA), the 11th Parliament passed key legislations to empower the youth such as the National Employment Authority Act 2016 and the Amendments to the Public Procurement and Disposal Act 2015. In spite of the presidential assent, these statutes have been undermined by implementation bottlenecks.

While the Youth Summit held at State House in 2017 served to highlight the problems youth face, particularly with regard to entrepreneurship, the solutions were however not comprehensively discussed, neither were points of action by specific persons and institutions.

Tangible recommendations were not forthcoming as well. Another key reason we are yet to address problems youth face is that government efforts as well as those of other organisations have remained disjointed and independent of each other. Moreover, county and national governments have failed to agree on where youth function lies. Creating synergy between national and county government should therefore be a priority.

The sum of all these challenges have engendered a sense of exclusion among the youth whose population continues to rise as their needs multiply.

 It is in this respect that members of both the National Assembly and the Senate from across the political divide, as well as CECs and MCAs drawn from all counties have come up with the ‘State of the Youth Dialogue’.

This is essentially a platform for State and non-state actors as well as the youth themselves to amplify their issues and give recommendations on the way forward.

The formation of this initiative is informed by the realisation that past strategies to address the youth problems have not yielded satisfactory results. Despite all these efforts, majority of the youth remain disillusioned, disengaged and disempowered. Devolution has attempted to resolve these issues but low levels of participation among youth has proved a major hindrance.

The State of the Youth Dialogue seeks to bring together all players to develop a framework of synergy between state departments, and ensure overall better coordination of diverse efforts and investments meant for the youth so that they can have optimum impact.

The forum also aims to enhance youth inclusion in decision-making in the national and county governance.  Further, it seeks to accelerate formulation and implementation of policies touching on the youth.  

This new platform will be as inclusive as possible. A national consultative forum for young people and youth organisations will be held so that everyone’s perspective is taken into account.

The short-term target of the dialogue is the creation of an Integrated Youth Development Delivery Charter, which will, among other things, capture the root causes of the youth challenges and more fundamentally broad-based solutions to them. The charter will also identify opportunities for collaboration between the youth and youth organisations.

Ultimately, these efforts are geared towards giving the youth an enabling environment to realise their varied potential and lead better lives.