University student leaders in the country are appealing to the government to set up a fund that would see jobless graduates get a monthly allowance. According to The Star newspaper, Kenya University Students Union (KUSU) wants the government to pay jobless diploma and degree graduates KES 5,000 and KES 10,000 respectively every month.
When the above discussion was raised on twitter by Pesatalk, it stirred up mixed reactions from the public on social media some of whom were for the idea and some against. Each year, a big number of graduates from universities and tertiary institutions join the job-hunting group in Kenya, but not so many can get a chance. High unemployment rates have left millions of youths jobless.
The government set up the Youth Enterprise Development Fund to provide young people in the country with capital to enable them start their own businesses. The initiative has not produced much result as the rate of unemployment remains and as experts say technical, structural and governance challenges since inception of the fund hinder the youth from accessing the fund. This has been blamed on the tendency by banks and financial intermediaries exploiting the low interests to lend to their own clients as opposed to the targeted recipients.
All countries in the world that have unemployment benefit schemes pay benefits to contributors who have fallen out of employment. Most countries require that an applicant for the benefit must have contributed for at least 12 months. Some of these countries include Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, Greece, Finland among others and non of them have provisions for graduates fresh from college.
Will creation of a new fund solve the unemployment problem? We collected a few views from twitter.