Youth should be empowered to be job creators

Today Rwanda joins the rest of the world to celebrate the International Youth Day under the theme “Youth Migration: Moving Development Forward. This offers yet another opportunity to once again reflect and increase awareness about youth challenges and the best ways to address them.The Rwandan population is largely dominated by the youth, according to the national demographic structure with about 78.7% of the population under 35 years of age. Unemployment is a major challenge for the youth currently. The youth comprise majority of the unemployed.Strategies to address youth challenges should be strengthened. Unemployment among the youth perpetrates, poverty, insecurity, drug abuse, crime and lawlessness. Government’s job creation programmes like Hanga Umurimo should be supported to make them sustainable to absorb the vulnerable youth.An estimated 125, 000 youths join the job market annually. Support funds should also be made more accessible to the youth to start own jobs.Also the nature of education in institutions should be aligned to address the job creation needs as opposed to job searching. Government plans of scaling up technical and vocational education is one of the best problem-solving actions. It should be strongly supported to produce the type of skills needed to address unemployment.In addition, the youth should strive to be job creators through starting income generating projects instead of only looking at getting white collar jobs.

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Youth should be empowered to be job creators