Vision 2030 should hinge on youth empowerment

By 2030, a child born today will be 19-years-old. This child will have just completed high school by then. Another one born the year this vision was conceived will have clocked 28 years.

The latter will have graduated from university or college and probably ‘working’ or looking for a job.

If our population continues to grow at the rate at which it has grown in the last two censuses, we might be 50-plus million Kenyans.

By then, our resources will have been strained even more. And like the sages say, to be forewarned is to be forearmed.

We cannot just sit and wait for 2030 as it is likely our challenges will have doubled by that time.

About 50 per cent of qualified youths are unemployed. The figure will have grown astrologically bigger by 2030. I am therefore compelled to think Vision 2030 might find us grappling with massive joblessness.

I know the director of Vision 2030 would want us to believe they are doing something about it. But if indeed they were, then surely by now we would have seen some results.

It bears restating our system of education, which only seems to produce robots, needs an overhaul.

A system of education worth its name is one that equips our youths in schools with skills and not just textbook knowledge.

Recently, I had a moment to wonder to myself what else I would do to put food on the table if today I stopped teaching. I would starve to death since I am just a blackboard teacher!

I do not have any skill to engage in anything apart from passing textbook knowledge. I am repeating the same tragedy to my students.

How I wish our schools, colleges and universities can start teaching practical life skills instead of book knowledge. It is even more tragic that nowadays everybody wants to offer degrees without caring who will absorb all these graduates.

Further, experience has shown that skill-oriented individuals become more successful in life than their book knowledge counterparts.

Ashford Kimani, Kahawa West