Forging a way to fight youth unemployment and create jobs

Every year we have thousands of graduates with just hundreds of jobs available and then we sing the same song over and over – BE JOB CREATORS NOT SEEKERS. Let us face it, how many of our graduates are taught to actually be entrepreneurs or how many of them graduate with the skills to be competitive enough in this cutthroat economy of the 21st century? We have a lot to ask of them yet we have given them so little to expect results around these issues of being job creators. Just recently, a group of university students from the Adventist University of Central Africa tried to find the answer to some of the questions above with a web application called Youth Fund Investment (YouFi) Davy Nshuti, one of the developers, says the main aim for YouFi was to encourage graduates to become entrepreneurs with fewer phobias about their capacity to build something that will eventually earn them a living for life. “YouFi is a platform where different graduates come up with ideas, upload them on the site and then list down what kinds of technical, financial or managerial skills they need in their business and experts from all over the world can assist and mentor in one’s area of interest — for both skills and services,” he narrated. Nshuti furthermore says the whole idea behind YouFi is that there is a lot of knowledge all over the world that experts want to share and this is one way they are making this possible. William Okafor, a developer Platform Evangelist, says the application does a lot more than just encourage entrepreneurship and build capacity. “It very important for the youth to realise that it’s not always funds or grants or investment that they need to get started with their business. Knowledge is the one key thing and if they can find that, then who wouldn’t have reason to be an entrepreneur?” Okafor said. Very many students today look up to graduating and working for some telecom company, bank or a very established company that will give them their own desk and table, maybe also have a work car parked outside. These thoughts don’t come because they don’t want to be entrepreneurs, but rather because they have seen their friends fail in the entrepreneurial space and seen their employed friends get married after two years. This platform celebrates and shares the success stories of entrepreneurs who have made it and it also tries to create all suitable conditions for an entrepreneur to make it. With this, I really hope the mindset of job seeking is kicked out and we have a number of graduates that start investing their time in self-employment even before graduation. Remember, self-employment doesn’t need a degree or good marks on a transcript. All it needs is hard work, commitment and a “Never give up” spirit.