CREATE ACCOUNTABILITY ON YOUTH ENTERPRISE PROGRAMMES – SARFED

MBABANE – There is a need to create accountability on youth enterprise programmes as advised by the Southern Africa Research Foundation for Economic Development (SARFED).

While the youth engagement in productive activities at national, regional and global scale seems to have taken most of the policymakers, concerns among many African countries, including the Kingdom of Eswatini, very little seems to be materialising positively in arresting the fast-growing rates of unemployment as revealed by SARFED Regional Coordinator and Senior Policy Advisor Dr George Choongwa.However, if properly harnessed, the challenge of youth unemployment would prevent many socio-economic challenges affecting most African countries both in the present and the future as stated by Choongwa.

Paradigm

He said some of these challenges include environmental, economic, social, and political tensions. “Policy implications affecting youth entrepreneurship in Africa and Eswatini are associated with several cross-cutting issues that range from change in socio-economic paradigm to that of costly institutional practices of corruption,” he said. He said developing and aligning national and regional policy practices that promote proper empowerment and accountability for youth entrepreneurship practices remain to be an indispensable approach.
According to Choongwa, this will demand a complete paradigm shift from the traditional practice of the top down financing of young people into business of scaling up the already existing ones who also happen to be organic and resilient to prevailing socio-economic challenges.

“Most governments have remained committed to ending youth poverty and unemployment through the provision of several supporting mechanisms to a few willing business orientated youths.  These models have generated mixed results, with high levels of failure and discontinuity due to various factors some of which include high default rates, poor market linkages, as well as limited expansion techniques in place,” he said. He said the youth unemployment rate continues to rise due shrinking global and regional economy, leaving Eswatini with very limited availability of resources to stimulate the economy at a higher and faster rate. “Therefore, creating accountability as well as promotion of transition from the traditional top-bottom to bottom-up business development approach would serve sustainable triggers for a vibrant and competitive youth-led entrepreneurship development agenda in Africa and Eswatini in particular.  

Capital

A bottom-up model would serve a collective or multi-sector multiplier model that would promote the development and implementation of sustainable business practices, which would serve a collective and sustainable initiative for human capital development in Eswatini.” Choongwa said it is good news to note that fighting corruption had been one of the government’s top priorities and significant results have begun to emerge across all prominent sectors. However, with the traditional model of youth empowerment, such vices are likely to re-emerge and remain recurrent in the near future as revealed by Choongwa.  He said one of the contributing reasons to this is based on not putting in place sustainable policy systems that promoted higher levels of accountability and transparency at ground level. 

Post your comment

Your name:

Your e-mail address:

Add your comments:

Please enter the code you see in the image:

Image:

Code: