Youths want allocation for Enterprise Fund increased to Sh1 billion

Youth organizations now want the government to increase allocation to the Youth Enterprise Development Fund from the current Sh412 million to at least Sh1 billion.

The Youth-Serving Organisations Consortium on Thursday said the increase should be with immediate effect.

This is to go towards the administrative functions as well as carry out its mandate of capacity building young people through facilitation of loans to enable them to venture into entrepreneurship.

The associations include PAWA254, Tribeless Youth and Run for Office Kenya.

They also want the government through the ministry of ICT and youth to call for a national youth stakeholder’s conference in two months to discuss and come up with solutions to various issues raised regarding the proposed merger of Affirmative Action Funds.

“This is not a favour that we are asking for because the President did say that we lose Sh2 billion a day yet the money that has been allocated to the youth is a drop in the ocean so we demand that this be relooked into and more funds allocated to the youth,” PAWA254 founder Njeri Mwangi said.

They also want the bill to regularize the current affirmative action funds to be fast-tracked and presented to Parliament for adoption before Parliament is dissolved.

The President in a bid to streamline government operations in 2014 set up a Presidential Taskforce on Parastatal Reforms to interrogate the policies on management and governance of Kenya’s parastatals and determine how best they would contribute to national development.

Among the recommendations was the amalgamation of the Affirmative Action Funds that include Uwezo Fund, Youth Enterprise Development Fund and the Women Enterprise into one fund dubbed the Biashara Kenya Fund.

“The amalgamation process ran into hurdles that effectively stopped the operationalization of the new proposed fund and the Biashara Kenya Fund Bill never made it to the floor of Parliament for enactment into law,” Executive Director Tribeless Youth Shiko Kihika said.

“The current state of affairs has a consequence of stalling the entrepreneurial spirit of many young people who have no access to capital,” Run for Office Kenya founder Wilkister Aduma said.

They have noted that the money currently allocated to the Youth Enterprise Fund is hardly enough to cater for the fund’s yearly operations budget and the dispensing of the much-needed loans to the many vulnerable youths who require cash injections into their businesses.

In response, the Ministry of ICT and Youth has acknowledged that the issue of funding is a matter that should be looked into as all sectors of the economy struggle to recover from the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Covid-19 made the situation worse in terms of unemployment rates and most young people lost their jobs so we admit there is that challenge and we are going to go back to the drawing board to see which areas we need to realign,” Secretary youth affairs at the ICT Ministry Raymond Ouma said.

“We cannot do it alone, we have always had a conversation with Parliament in areas we need to improve to make sure that the affirmative funds have got more money to the youth, to the women and to the persons with disability,” he added.

Edited by D Tarus