To improve household incomes and ability of young people to meet their economic and employment needs through skilling, agency, and leadership, access to income generation and business training opportunities in the effort to ensure total human development. Efforts are made to ensure that youth have access to decent jobs as enshrined in the SDG 8, particular focus will be on vulnerable adolescent girls and young women.
Unemployment, lack of gainful employment opportunities, educational issues, poor social services, drug abuse and depression are key challenges affecting Kenyan youth who make up over 30% of the population. About 800,000 of youth enter the labour market annually, yet about 35% are absorbed in comparison to 10% national unemployment rate. To address this situation, the government has developed a raft of measures to address youth unemployment. However, the level of unemployment is still rising leading to negative socio- economic impacts such as insecurity, exploitation and Gender Based Violence.
Tech innovation; and agriculture and agribusiness have huge potential. However, there has always been little interest and uptake of agriculture and agribusiness opportunities by young women and men in Kenya, despite the immense potential for poverty reduction in rural areas, who are largely driven by real and perceived notions about differential decent self and wage employment.
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View Current ProjectsProgrammatic Goal:
Contribute to decent jobs and employment opportunities creation through sustainable economic and skills development and advocating for conducive environment to youth entrepreneurship.
OAY understands that the youth experience inadequate work readiness and employability skills due to non-market responsive education, skill-jobs mismatch, little to no opportunities, poor labour market information system and linkages, corruption and less comprehensive policies and strategies. While most policies are pushing youth to self- employment, majority prefer wage employment. These issues are exacerbated by little experience and fewer on-job training opportunities given that impede effective education-work transition.