Youth unemployment can be sorted

By Boniface Tukwasiibwe

I would like to this opportunity to share my experience in solving youth unemployment. In the year 2002 I graduated with an honors Degree from Makerere University. I was staying with a friend in a one roomed house at Makerere Kavule near Kalerwe Slum.  In a bid to survive in Kampala, we taught in nearby private schools and we were paid sh3,000 per lesson. In a week, we could make an average of sh12,000.

One day while flipping through old newspapers we noticed an article about a gentleman who was making a living by collecting, cleaning and selling old plastic items.  We thought we could join the trade since we were staying near Kalerwe slum where such items were in plenty. We just started with money earned from our meager salary of sh12,000 per week. We employed services of local young boys in Kalerwe. For every sack full of plastic items, we paid sh100. Within a week’s time, we had about 80 bags. In order to get bigger space where to clean and pack them, we requested Aunt Judith who was staying in the neighborhood to lend us her garage. She allowed. We hired a wheel barrow pusher who transported our merchandise to the newly acquired store (Garage). As we were doing this, we were also looking for jobs.

My friend Henry was the first to get a job with one of the International Banks in Kampala. I eventually also got a job as a field officer with one of the International Non-Government organizations in Hoima. We abandoned the business before we could make any sales.

I have decided to document our experience because of the following reasons:

One is that there are many opportunities outside there that can be exploited. Today my friend Victor in Mbarara is making a good living out of the business idea that we abandoned.

One doesn’t need a lot of money to start a business. We started with our weekly salary of sh12,000. The business was gradually expanding.

Where there is a will there is away. Aunt Judith was willing to give us space in her garage to be used as a store.

You don’t have to be ashamed of what you are doing as longs as it is bringing in money. As graduates, we were not directly collecting this garbage from the drainage channels. We employed the local boys to do it for us. We were managing by walking around!

Lastly but not least, I want to share a story from  Andrew Rugasira’s  book A Good African Story, he tells an experience when he asked his American friend business mission and the reply was that he was there to make mistakes and help others avoid them.  So the youths should learn from our experience and avoid mistakes we made.

In the New Vision, Monday, August, 12, 2013, Robert Kabushenga reiterated the path taken by Germans to tackle youth unemployment by offering vocational training that is relevant to the country’s economic activities out of which it derived a competitive advantage (Very important).

Last year, I got a chance to visit Chamber of Crafts and Skilled Trade in Munster City, Germany. The Institute offers 94 professions in the field of crafts and skilled trades which include hairdressing, fashion and design, brick making, bakery and shoe making, among others. They work with 24,000 companies, 16,500 apprentices and the school has only 270 employees.

Among the many professions, they are offering, they sampled for us fashion and design. Some graduates of this course who excel are taken up by some of the international fashion houses and their products are the designer clothes we buy expensively. Our guide also informed us that most watch making Companies in Switzerland source their workers from this Institute. What do we learn from the Germans? One of the lessons is that they have professionalised their work. Even a butcher is first trained!

As we grapple with youth unemployment, we could also start from somewhere. The first thing we have to change is the mindset and attitude towards work. We need to be more creative in our work. Change the way our grandfathers used to do things. For example, as a carpenter, make a foldable bed so that a room can be used as an office during the day and bedroom at night.

We could also professionalise some of our activities. Today you can’t tell our university graduates to slaughter a pig. They will say it is a dirty job. But if we trained them on how to build better abattoirs and handle meat in a healthy and cleaner way, we could create a thousand jobs.  Our real estate industry is growing but masons and painters are still wanting. They want to cheat you at any opportunity and such jobs have been shunned because they are seen as cheap and for low placed members of society. If we trained our youths on proper customer care and professionalism, courses like carpentry, painting, and plumbing would be more attractive and profitable.

The stakeholders in the vocational training institutes should think creatively about what the society needs and design tailor made courses. The traditional courses of carpentry and joinery need to be redesigned to include innovativeness and creativity. The Government should also revamp our curriculum so that vocational training and soft skills are embedded in some of the courses done at university.

The writer is a development Worker with Uganda Kolping Society, Hoima.