NAIROBI, Kenya, Sept 29- 3000 youth are set to benefit from an internship and job placement program through a partnership between BrighterMonday Kenya, Creative Management Consultants Ltd, and the Kenya Youth Employment and Opportunities Project (KYEOP) under The Ministry of ICT, Innovation and Youth Affairs.
The agreement was formalized and launched a week ago on September 19 at the Ministry of ICT offices in Nairobi, signaling the beginning of the World Bank-funded program aimed at driving socioeconomic growth for the youth.
Announcing the partnership, BrighterMonday’s CEO Brian Ntambirweki said that the program will lay the foundation for both organizations to develop more strategies for youth empowerment and boost their chances of employment.
“We remain keen on supporting the youth and enabling them to get access to jobs in Kenya, and by collaborating with the Ministry of ICT under KYEOP, which is working on different initiatives, we are confident that we are heading towards the right direction in solving labour market challenges in Kenya,” Ntambirweki stated.
The project will offer opportunities to the Kenyan youth, drawn from 17 counties across the country who will get access to different employers across diverse work disciplines.
The announcement comes at a time when the unemployment rate in the country is on the increase with World Bank data showing that 5.7 percent of Kenya’s labor force was out of work in 2021, up from 2.8 percent in 2013.
BrighterMonday CEO termed the project timely saying Africa’s population is young and youthful necessitating the need to tap into their energetic resources and upskill them for better employment.
He went on to say that the company is committed to investing in talent while also collaborating with other individuals and like-minded organizations that are tackling these kinds of challenges at scale.
“As part of our renewed mandate, we are now going beyond offering jobs and digging deeper into talent development through learning and upskilling to ensure that Africans and Kenyans are better equipped to participate in labor markets with strong and relevant transferable skills,” he said.
Augustine Mayabi, National Project Co-ordinator at KYEOP on his part said the move is a great step towards reducing unemployment, arguing that a majority of the youth lack the requisite skills to assist them land opportunities.
“We are happy to witness the unveiling of a great initiative that will enable the youth in these 17 counties to get access to training and employment opportunities. We have noticed that after training these youth with various training institutions, we lose track of some, and we now want to bring them back on board to offer internships and employment opportunities as they are fully equipped,” Mayabi said.
The Kenya Youth Employment and Opportunities Project (KYEOP) is a Government of Kenya (GoK) flagship project aiming to address the multiple employment challenges affecting youth employment using a multi-sectorial approach.
To tackle unemployment, organizations keep devising strategies to deal with the problem.
For most, partnerships are becoming key as they implement the projects holistically. Public-private partnerships are now taking over the scene from different sectors to address different societal challenges.
BrighterMonday was established in 2006 and has grown to become Kenya’s leading recruitment and HR services platform.
Currently over 800,000 candidates and 36,000 employers, successfully using the platform to get access to the right opportunities.
