KEETMANSHOOP: Young people from the ||Kharas Region said there is a need for Government to involve more young people when developing programmes aimed to address unemployment among young people.
These sentiments were part of the inputs from some youth on Tuesday in Keetmanshoop, during a public hearing by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Human Resources and Community Development on the motion of youth unemployment.
One of the participants, Rodler Gertze said: “We the young people know what we need to ensure the unemployment issue is addressed, we know the programmes that will work for us so we need to be part of the programme setting process. There is also a need to invest in sports and talent development and these players can earn a living.”
Laurentius Roos said Government should regulate companies especially private companies to ensure that they do in-service training than demanding or requiring young people to have years of experience.
“These companies, even the mining companies want five to seven years of experience for a general position, now how do you expect a young person coming from school or university to have such experience, these companies could rather take these young people and do on-job training,” said Roos.
Participant Mohamed Frederick said there is a need to change the education system to be more technical and centred on producing employers and not just employees.
“Our education system is designed for us to be employees, I think we need to improve on our technical subjects at schools so that our skills and talents are developed at an early age, so we thrive in those areas too, to ensure that we produce and manufacture our own things that will help us towards industrialisation,” he added.
Fabianus Sonn said: “We believe that vocational training centres should be able to take in those that do not have Grade 10 or Grade 12, we get people that grow up in child-headed households and they are forced to leave school at an early age to take care of the other siblings, now when these people get old, they want to start studying and improve their living standard but they’ve got nowhere to study or so,” he said.
Other issues raised at the meeting include Government investing more in agriculture and sports and to come up with better programmes that support entrepreneurs where entrepreneurs have the resources they need to progress.
Source: The Namibian Press Agency