Mind the Gap: Moving from Dependency to Sustainability

• In Event: "Jitegemee" - educating vulnerable youth in Kenya for sustainability

Proposal

For more than a decade, Jitegemee Children’s Program has operated on the rationale that if we provide support to ensure a vulnerable child receives an education – be it a formal schooling or vocational training – then he or she will be able engage in decent employment and sustain him or herself. Recent evaluation of the program shows that many of the program graduates have been able to do exactly that: complete their studies and find menial work to sustain themselves and their families. But often at a very low and often unsustainable level.

Our goal has always been to provide holistic, integrated services to the most vulnerable children and families in Machakos, Kenya. However, while providing education and other support services to our children and their families, we are constantly mindful that rather than creating dependency, our programs and services should ensure our beneficiaries become self-sustaining. Often, NGOs such as ours are encouraged to “not give beneficiaries everything” because they will become dependent on the organization rather than developing their own coping skills. But we have come to realize that if we do not provide enough support, our beneficiaries will never translate their education into decent employment.

In 2017, our staff conducted a needs assessment with 200 youth working in the informal trade sector in Machakos that showed that most were earning erratically and living below the poverty line. None of them had been able to successfully enter the formal workforce. While this is perhaps unsurprising amongst those with a basic trade or vocational training, it echoes concerns we hear constantly from college graduates in our school sponsorship program: there are no jobs or even internships that may lead to jobs once they graduate from college. Vulnerable youth, even with a college degree, often lack the workforce readiness skills and social/professional networks to successfully enter the formal workforce.

The Sustainable Development Goal number 8 – Decent work and economic growth says that “sustainable economic growth will require societies to create the conditions that allow people to have quality jobs.” While we recognize the limitations we face as a small NGO to make a significant impact on the “conditions” our graduates experience, it has become clear that access to education alone is not enough to ensure decent work. Young people need to develop workforce readiness skills, as well as practical entrepreneurship skills, in order to successfully navigate the work sector - skills they do not learn in the formal education sector.

In partnership with some of our graduates, we have developed and designed a workforce readiness and entrepreneurship training program to address this gap in our programming - workforce readiness and entrepreneurship training - that we will roll out in 2019. We are seeking collegial and critical engagement from peers at CIES – who have some understanding and knowledge of programs of this nature – and who may be interested in sharing with and learning from our experience.

Author

• Verity Norman-Tichawangana, University of Massachusetts, Amherst