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For Youth, By Youth: Creating Jobs, Sustainability And A Future Vision For Kenya

This article is more than 9 years old.

Simeon Ogonda’s vision for Kenyan youth is ambitious. He wants to transform young people from job seekers into job creators who build and support sustainable and transparent enterprises. “My vision is to bring up more young people who can develop their own businesses, work hard, and trust that so long as they keep their passion alive, they will not fail in what they’re doing,” he said.

Ogonda, 26, is the founder of Enterprise Education-4-Change (Ee4C), a skills-building program that teaches undergraduate university students in Kisumu, the third largest city in Kenya, business development and management. This training ensures that they are better equipped to take leadership roles at community-based organizations, including agricultural ventures and social enterprises, or offer guidance to groups of women with a business plan, for example.

It also trains youth to serve as watchdogs for corruption from lenders, grantmakers, government officials, and even business leaders, who all too often disappear with part of an organization’s budget in their pockets. The watchdog role is one that university students relish, as they get a chance to help improve the sustainability and transparency of community-based organizations, as well as restore trust in the public sector.

To ensure that local business leaders respect student leadership, Ogonda has established working relationships with local ward administrators in the Kenyan government. These administrators not only report to the Kisumu county assembly, which has a serious stake in community development, but they are also in charge of disbursing grants and loans to local businesses. Simply put: If managers at community-based organizations don’t play with Ee4c’s business development program, the government won’t pay.

“Ee4c takes students through training on ethical management of business, networking, and grassroots democracy,” Ogonda said. “They learn how to both handle members of community-based organizations, work with them, and also understand that money is connected to grants and loans from the government—it should be used well, to promote their ventures.”

After their training on campus, students are matched with community-based organizations no more than an hour from campus. Students make trips to these organizations three times each week. Along the way, students also play a leading role in running local think tanks for the rural public, most of whom are semi-literate, a model which Ogonda piloted last year in Cleveland, Ohio, during a six-month fellowship with the U.S. State Department. In six months, students are assessed based on their skills development, leadership and impact.

Afterward, the university students are either placed with another organization or receive support and encouragement directly from Ee4c to launch their own ventures. Undergraduates do not have to be business majors or budding economists to participate. But they do have one thing in common: a passion for developing entrepreneurial solutions to real-world problems.

For example, a majority of the participants are members of Enactus, an international organization comprised of student leaders who are committed to entrepreneurial actions that transform lives and create a more sustainable world. Oganda is a graduate of the program himself.

Ee4C is a progressive, systems-oriented strategy for change in Kenya. Kenya’s unemployment rate is 8.6 percent, according to a recent report released by the Brookings Institute. For young people, the unemployment rate is almost double that.

“Our education system prepares graduates to be job seekers. Most graduates come out of school expecting employment, which, in most cases, is not there,” Ogonda said. “Involving students in business activities when [they are] still on campus allows them to sharpen their skills and experiences enough to be able to start their own projects immediately after they leave university.

“I intend to engage them every step of the way. It is only by doing this that we’ll be able to promote employment.”

Ee4C’s location in Kisumu, in western Kenya, has a goal of promoting youth-led enterprise development in more remote parts of the country, and thus slowing the rate of rural-to-urban migration. While cities are generally recognized as hubs of opportunity, especially for young people, that’s not exactly true for Kenya.

“The best way for a young person to grow is to start where there are resources and a strong market,” Ogonda said. “That is mostly in rural areas.”

Data confirms this idea. The unemployment rate for youth in rural areas—who benefit from strong, familiar social networks—is in single-digits, on par with the national rate. But the unemployment rate for urban youth is nearly 20 percent.

A lower cost of living in more rural areas is another plus. A young person in a city like Nairobi could save up to $250 every month, Ogonda said, but in rural Kisumu young business leaders can save the same amount in half the time.

Ogonda sees himself and other driven young leaders as proof that skill-building initiatives work—and can make a world of difference to local communities like those surrounding Kisumu. He credits his skills in sustainable business to participating in programs like Enactus and competing in social entrepreneurship challenges – he wants to create opportunities for other students to gain these skillsets.

He believes Ee4c will not only help expand Kenyan students’ exposure to community-based organizations, but also equip them with the skills to take charge in locally relevant ways—they’ll serve as decision-makers alongside adults in the community development process, which is a relatively new model for social change in rural Kenya.

“It doesn’t matter how many years of experience you have, so long as you know what you’re doing and know where to get advice when you’re stuck,” Ogonda said. “This is why I believe so much in my project.”

Simeon Ogonda is the founder of Enterprise Education-4-Change (Ee4C), a skills-building program that prepares young people to be entrepreneurs. Simeon is an early entry winner of theFuture Forward: Youth Innovations for Employment in Africa Challenge.The final winners of the Challenge will participate in the Changemakers Day to kick off the Globalizer Summit​ on Youth Employment in Africa in Cape Town, South Africa, on February 12. Submit a request to attend and follow #AfricaYouthFwd for more lessons and insights on innovation in youth employment. Join the #AfricaYouthFwd twitter chat on January 28 and February 25 at 9:30 a.m. ET.