Involve the youth in their livelihood issues

By Isaac Aliowaku

 As we prepare to commemorate the international youth day on August 12, 2016 in Koboko in West Nile under the theme: "The road to 2030: Eradicating poverty and achieving sustainable production and consumption", we should be mindful that young people play a critical role in driving this agenda forward as says Koffi Annan, the former UN Secretary General that "something for the young people without them is noted theirs".

In the past few years, the Government of Uganda (GoU) and development partners have continued to support reconstruction of northern Uganda. Over the past two decades, the Government proactively attempted to address the post conflict problems, rural poverty, extreme levels of vulnerability, poor service delivery, low agricultural productivity, social exclusion and weak local governments through a variety of policies and programmes.

 With the recent peace talks with the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), the Government launched the Peace, Recovery and Development Plan (PRDP 2007/8-2010/11) and Northern Uganda Social Action Fund (NUSAF) 1 and 2 for Northern Uganda to respond to the reconstruction needs of the region.

The PRDP contributed to the return and resettlement of the 1.6 million Internally Displaced People (IDP). Key investments included access roads, water and sanitation investments, re-establishment of health and education facilities and services including infrastructure and staffing.

All these programmes present a great opportunity to the people of the north, including young people. But my greatest concern as a young person is that, these programmes do not have youth specific components to address the mass unemployment in the region.

My thinking is that, as we journey to the achieving middle income status by 2020 and agenda 2030, the young people should be placed at the apex of development programmes. Last year, the committee of national economy approved a loan of worth $130m from International Development Association (IDA) of World Bank Group to support the Northern Uganda Social Action Fund project (NUSAF 3).

It is very imperative that in the implementation of this successor programme of NUSAF 3, the Government should specify the role of youth leaders and youth in implementing and monitoring the project.

More so, there is need to have specific component of the project allocated to the youth through reservation schemes, especially in procurement process. This could generate opportunities for the youth to actively participate in these projects and create jobs for themselves addressing poverty. So as we prepare to celebrate this day in Koboko, there is need to reflect on the role young people can play in the  implementation and monitoring of government programmes in addressing poverty and achieving agenda 2030.

The writer is a policy analyst with Uganda Parliamentary Forum on Youth Affairs