At least $3m (approx. sh10b) has been earmarked for research on youth aspirations, resilience, and adaptability during and post-COVID.

The project will run in the five regions across the country. It is intended to collect data from the youth and find out what they went through during COVID-19 and how they are coping.

The research will be carried out by the Makerere School of Gender and Studies on youth. The project will also be implemented in Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda and Senegal.

Victoria Namuggala one of the researchers said the project will look out for jobless pregnant adolescents, students, and youth who lost their jobs and businesses.

“The project is intended to know what youths are going through and see how they can be helped,” Namuggala said.

The funding is a partnership between the African Social and Governance Research (PASGR) with support from the MasterCard Foundation.

The executive director of PASGR Anthony Mveyange explained that the project which will be implemented in seven sub–Saharan African countries is intended to understand the crisis for the lives of African youth.

Mveyange said the project was conceived to help the youth address their aspiration, what they want and how they can survive after the pandemic.

He noted that youth from the urban, peri-urban and rural setting equally suffered during and after the pandemic and issues concerning their wellbeing should be addressed.

He advised young men and women who had started businesses during COVID-19 to strike a balance between their business and they should use the education to boost business.

Despite Uganda’s positive economic growth rates at 7.5% in 2019, the unemployment rate is still high at 13.3%.

The assistant commissioner in charge of agribusiness in the Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries, Yafesi Ogwang, said that government has several youth programs which they should get involved in.

He noted that involving youth in policy making is the way to go because they form 77% of the productive population of Uganda.

“We cannot handle government programs without their support because of production and productivity especially in post-harvest handling value addition and marketing.

There is need to change the mind-set of the youth that they can engage in agriculture for survival.

Martin Atela the head research and policy at PASGR said that even before COVID-19 the youth already had problems however during the pandemic their problems escalated with youths losing jobs, underemployment and unemployment was too much.

With COVID-19, the situation became worse youth fail out of school with those challenges a lot of youth have lost their jobs, night jobs closed they lost their rent it’s been a lot more than expected.

He however said that gone are the days when youth had one job, adding that there should be situations where youth have three jobs in a day.