Education is the key to life. Business will keep you financially afloat.
Brilliant candidates who passed KCSE 2018 exams are yet to know which institution of higher learning will enroll them.
Education CS Prof George Magoha is presiding over the university student placement exercise.
Over 90,000 students who hit the threshold score of C+ and above will know their fate Monday.
The question is, what is in store for the over 500,000 students who failed to hit the mark?
Since a huge junk of candidates were locked out.
This is a reason enough to think entrepreneurship.
The market is already saturated with graduates, therefore, just spending your youthful years in campus and coming out looking for a job isn’t the best idea.
There are many entrepreneurial activities one can engage in that will help turn around your life during and after college.
However, every young person cannot go out and try to entrepreneur themselves out of poverty.
That is an unfair burden not only because not every young person is an entrepreneur.
Also, the private and public sectors do not have the structures that support young entrepreneurs to enhance job creation and income growth for the youth.
There are two actions that can be done by both private and public sector to enhance private sector growth with a youth focus.
First is to more deliberately support business activity by the youth.
And that does not mean government youth funds that make requirements of young people such as forming groups in order to qualify.
Such requirements are more focused on government de-risking than creating viable financing options for young and often inexperienced entrepreneurs.
It is important that the government, and the private sector create inter-sectoral consortiums that more effectively leverage the types and scale of support targeting young entrepreneurs.
Secondly, is to better link youth education with private sector skill requirements.
And here the government and private sector really have to get out of their formal mandates and have a sincere commitment to solving this serious problem.
Everyone will tell you money is the issue.
That if they had more money they could do more.
Well, it seems the money problem won’t be fixed in the near future because of a blend of limited government budgets and private sector profit expectations.
Thus what is required is an aggregator of efforts in linking education-labor market skills gaps by both private and public sectors.
Let the government and private sector bodies more deliberately aggregate and coordinate education and youth skills programmes towards a joint objective.
Perhaps in doing so, the youth will be better linked to labour markets which can then drive productivity, profit gains and leverage the African youth dividend.