KUICHAILA (EDITORIAL COMMENT FOR FRIDAY 22ND AUGUST 2014) Miles Sampa’s engagement with our young people on issues of entrepreneurship deserves support and requires to be broadened. While it is correct to advise our youth to stop complaining and start addressing their own problems, it cannot be ignored that there are serious challenges in them being able to do things for themselves and on their own. It is true that if no one is doing anything for you, is preparing anything for you, kuichaila. But kuichaila also has limits. Our young people need help. Helping them to find opportunities is a critical challenge for us today. We need to leverage the talents and energies of our young people to create dramatically higher levels of prosperity and equality and avoid the latent risks of unemployment and the social instability that accompanies it. Building our young people’s skills, reaping their energies, and realising their aspirations would help us improve our living standards as a nation and ignite our country’s economic growth. And there is no doubt about that. Empowering our young people with opportunities to reach and apply their full potential is both our most important challenge and our most vital opportunity. We should try as often as possible to put ourselves in the shoes of these young people, full of promise but with few opportunities. They are a generation that is most and well connected globally. They know very well what is going on in other parts of the world. They see this on television channels on DStv. They read about all these things on the Internet. Although they can see the social and economic progress occurring elsewhere in the world, they are largely isolated from that progress. And this is stressful. This is painful. Offering our young people quality education is critical for their success. But the challenge is that even when they finish their school, college, university, they will most likely have trouble finding a skilled job. What is the point of doing all this just to go back home and find there is no food or other things needed for survival, for decent human living? It is demoralising for young people to find there is no work waiting for them when they leave school, college or university. It undermines their human dignity. It is a terrible frustration. We are sitting on a time bomb unless we create jobs through ingenuity, ability and the skills of our young people. And it is the job of our leaders like Miles to ensure that the hundreds of thousands of our young people who are willing to work and improve their future have every opportunity to experiment, learn, adapt - and eventually succeed in entrepreneurship, business or indeed in their employment. We must use this significant inflection point in our country’s history to guarantee that the entrepreneurial nimbleness, grit, and vigour of our young people can be utilised to help lift our country from poverty and despair. The way we educate our young people will make all the difference. Entrepreneurship must be an integral part of every young person’s education in this country. We need to impart not only the technical skills of entrepreneurship, but also the mindset of the entrepreneur, through our formal and informal education systems. We have to prepare our young people to creatively confront our country’s most pressing challenges through inter-disciplinary experiential educational opportunities. Let our young people learn about our trailblazers in business, politics and social affairs by increasing their interaction with people like Miles and by giving them a set of inspirational role models to follow. Our young people also need access to capital - in the form of micro venture capital or microfinance - to help them turn their own business concepts into reality. In this way, real, live small-scale enterprises that will one day form the roots of much larger enterprises can be created, and in turn help to create the much-needed jobs in our country. If we give a young person a chance to get his or her hands dirty as an entrepreneur, we will inspire and prepare that young person to one day launch entrepreneurial ventures on a much larger scale - ventures that can potentially create thousands of jobs. And we need to give as many of our young people as possible access to high quality entrepreneurial education and practical opportunities to apply their ideas, ambitions and talents to real world opportunities and challenges. To create a supply of jobs for our young people and a wave of empowered young people to fill them requires a lot of work, a lot of planning. To do this, coordinated investments are needed in each part of our educational pipeline, from early childhood through to the entry-level labour market. Indeed, success requires the coalescing of today’s fragmented landscape of youth development programmes into a harmonised network of interventions that weave together households, communities, schools and companies in the service of our young people. Working together, we can provide high-potential young people with the experiences they need to be successful in the marketplace. To decisively reorient ourselves toward increasing success, equity and stability, we must fully empower our greatest untapped resource: our young people. Providing access to entrepreneurial opportunities and experiences will ensure that all our young people have the opportunity to develop their talents and realise their dreams. Our country may be well known for its copper, cobalt, manganese and other minerals, but its true wealth lies in its people, especially its young people. Only by unlocking the potential of this treasure - by giving them a chance to work or to create their own jobs - will we finally achieve the prosperity that our copper and other minerals have so far failed to bring to our country, to our people. The work that Miles is doing and the message he is carrying across may seem to be nothing, to be too little. What a single ant brings to the anthill is very little; but what a great hill is built when each one does their proper share of the work!
Posted on: Fri, 22 Aug 2014 11:21:39 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015