The organization works with youth from vulnerable communities through its 32 centres across the country.
NAIROBI, Kenya, Apr 9 – The global youth training organization Generation Kenya is planning to add more employer-led courses to their program before the end of 2019 aimed at reducing the high rate of unemployment amongst the youth.
Generation Kenya currently has five programs where some of the youths are placed under financial services, distributed sales, customer service agents and sewing machine operator aligned to acquiring manufacturing skills under the government’s big four agenda.
Majority of employers have staged complaints about graduates lacking skills and now the companies are forced to introduce an in housing training before absorbing them.
Head of business development Lydia Karingithi says the organization is seeking employer’s guidance to help in generating fresh courses that will suit the market need.
“We are now focusing on Kenya at the moment since the rate of unemployment is really high in the country and we are addressing the gap through a program we intend to introduce by the end of the year. With that, we are constantly going back to the market to identify some of the skills that the employers are increasingly looking for so that we know the new ones we can officially launch,” said Karingithi.
Generation Kenya is majorly known for connecting the youth between the ages of 18-35 years with different employers once they are done with their 4-8 week training. The period of studying is always dependent on the course one selected to do.
The organization works with youth from vulnerable communities through its 32 centres across the country.
Currently, it is working with 300 employers where they follow up on the recruitment of every student once they officially graduate from the program.
“We follow up with employers a year later after employment and see how they perform compared to their peers. That easily helps us understand where we can concentrate more to suit their needs,” said Lydia.
The organization is now focusing on working with government organizations and different partners such as Safaricom to ensure some of the skills are aligned to the government big four agenda.
This will facilitate easy placement of students once the course and graduation period is done as it targets to train 25,000 young people by 2020.
