The Youth Enterprise Development Fund is among the affirmative programmes initiated by the government as conduits through which persons close to power steal public funds. The story of the NYS needs no retelling. Those trooping to the Parliamentary Accounts Committee have tales about accomplices that depict the NYS coffers as a self-service counter.
Despite the danger posed by the unemployed youth, “youth projects” are the in-thing for the politicians affiliated to the government, eager to cash in on them. There is the pitiful idea of every constituency hosting a technical institute apparently to offer youth vocational skills. What you get are poorly semi-constructed unfinished buildings without equipment and enough qualified teachers.
The downside of these projects is that they’re actually tailor-made for siphoning off public money. It’s surprising that Youth Affairs CS Sicily Kariuki is unaware of this and pleaded with youths to apply for the YEDF funds. According to her, the uptake of loans at YEDF is slow, if not low.
However, youth may as well be dissuaded from the YEDF, given its negative profile 10 years since establishment. The core disincentive is that the culture of entrepreneurship has not been inculcated in these youths. Additionally, the YEDF hasn’t defined its target clientele. First, when YEDF speaks in generic terms, you’d think youth are a homogeneous lot undifferentiated by age, education, skills and career ambitions.
Second, categories of youth have been nurtured in a culture of hand-outs by politicians. The effect is that some youth are not likely to seek entrepreneurship opportunities that require them to pay back loans, especially money given out by the government which the youth believe belongs to them by right. They’re so used to freebies that it’s almost an insult to ask them to pay back amounts borrowed from the government. One would want to peruse the YEDF books to determine the default rate.
Indeed, the YEDF attempted to circumvent defaulting by disbursing the money through banks. This monumentally failed — and because of low loan uptake. This was largely contributed by the stiff conditions set by intermediaries eager to make lending profits. Banks made their money while defaulting on loaning to youths. The YEDF has, therefore, existed to service itself rather than serve the youth. It hasn’t even gotten any the wiser under the new management: Embarking on a speculative bloated management structure that stretches to all the 290 constituencies proves a fund that feeds on itself.
That’s why I often wonder what the YEDF mission is. Is it to develop enterprises to absorb youths, to empower the youth to have start-up enterprises, or to be an incubator like the Kenya Industrial Estates? It’s disheartening that government’s philosophy around YEDF has zeroed in on enabling the youth to access part of the 30 percent government tenders reserved for youth, women and persons living with disabilities.
The new YEDF chairman, Ronald Osumba, loudly advances the same miserable “enterprise” mantra by targeting 100,000 youths to be trained “on doing business with government” and, therefore, “increase the uptake and delivery of tenders by the youth”. Osumba, like every other politician, is upbeat about this fund’s impact, despite contradictory figures of failure and the recent cases of plunder. TheYEDF is a political playground to get votes rather than a sustainable economic empowerment plan.