A new law approved by Parliament yesterday will upon promulgation reduce the age bracket of the youth to 16-30 years.

According to Government, the move to trim the bracket, which under the current law is between 14-35 years, aimed at among others streamline the different interventions towards empowering youth and making them more focused.

The new age bracket is one of the provisions in the law that determines the mission, organisation and functioning of the National Youth Council.

The new bracket means that those in the youth category in the country will now be about 30 per cent of the population while the previous age bracket was constituted 39 per cent of the population.

"The focus of the government is to empower youth in terms of training and work opportunities. That’s why we want to focus on young people who are still in the transition from school to work,” the Minister of Youth and ICT, Jean-Philbert Nsengimana told The New Times.

He gave an example saying that in the previous law, someone at 14 years was too young to discuss work-related issues while 35 years was also too old to be empowered in terms of training.