The East African Legislative Assembly (EALA) Youth Caucus is expected to support young people in the East African Community (EAC) to take advantage of available opportunities, address their problems including unemployment, and leverage their potential to foster regional integration, The New Times understands.

It is now a recognised entity of the EAC parliament after it passed a motion to that end. The motion recognising the caucus as a forum for members of EALA to promote the full participation of youth in programmes and activities of the community was moved on March 13, during a plenary sitting in Kenya, by MP Alodie Iradukunda, from Rwanda, and seconded by MP Machano Ali Machano, from Tanzania. It was adopted by EALA on the same day.

Iradukunda is the vice chairperson of the EALA Youth Caucus, while Maina Karobia, from Kenya, is its chairperson.

The motion indicated that the youth make up the highest number of the population of the community and are one of the recognised special interest groups in each of its partner states.

In an interview with The New Times, Iradukunda said that EALA Youth Focus "is actually a legacy that we’ll even keep in EALA even when we have left.”

On planned activities under the caucus, she said they will look at the programmes and activities of EAC "and make sure that we include young people.”

Also, she said that the caucus will look for partnerships with different organisations and institutions that can support some of the actions that require further contributions to be able to achieve more.

She said it will work with different partners to help the youth tap into opportunities that the region offers, such as a simplified trade regime which allows goods that do not exceed $2,000 to be traded tax-free within EAC.

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"Another reason that it is important to have the youth caucus is to tell the young people that there are opportunities that they should tap into,” she said, citing a simplified trade regime that some young people are not aware of.

This arrangement was meant to facilitate small-scaled traders through duty-free intra-regional trade of eligible products.

Iradukunda said the platform will also help link young people to markets for goods they will be trading in.

Again, she indicated, that it plans to help build the capacity of national youth councils in EAC partner states to make sure that the voices of young people are heard.

"The main issue is we have a lot of priorities in EAC. And sometimes, the youth’s priorities are sort of put aside. We need specifically to prioritise some of the youth issues. So, for us, we will concentrate on that,” she said, citing unemployment and lack of access to the market among other things.

"We will be working on a strategic plan for five years, after the strategic plan we will be working on an action plan for every year,” she said, adding that the EALA Youth Caucus strategic plan is expected to be ready by the end of June 2024.

For her, trading is one of the ways to tackle unemployment among the youth "because it means you are obviously getting some income, it means you might employ some other young people, it means you are looking at setting up businesses.

Regional youth must be saved from desperation

MP Woda Jeremiah, from South Sudan, said that it’s really in order for the youth caucus to be recognised.

Africa, she said, is known as the young continent because of the higher population of the youth in it, and East Africa is not different because it is part of Africa, voicing concern that some of the continent’s young people are exploited abroad as they are desperately looking for means to earn a living.

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"Youth in our continent are really disadvantaged in many ways. And it pains me many times when I see our youths being smuggled through the Mediterranean Sea to go to Europe because they lack job opportunities,” she said.

"It really pains me when I see them in the Middle East, most of them being enslaved and we know what’s happening. I see many young people, young girls being shipped every now and then to these countries without the supervision of our governments,” she lamented.

MP Gerald Blacks Siranda, from Uganda, described the motion as very timely because the East African Community has about 350 million people, with the youth accounting for a large proportion of the population.

"The future of this community depends on this biggest population for them to be prepared in order to be very productive for this community that we aspire to be the greatest and fastest-growing community,” he said, expressing concern that some of the youths are desperate with no reliable source of income, leading them to accept meagre pay for survival.

"Those are young people that also have families, and if we don’t plan for them, we will be building this community on shaky ground,” he said.