Find ways to make graduates productive

The number of graduates being churned out by our universities is impressive.

It just shows that Kenya is growing into a knowledge based economy and I anticipate lots of such industries to emerge and grow.

I also love seeing a large community of intellectuals as I anticipate they will engineer positive change and development in our economy as would be the case in the world.

However, some reality check is important. Do we have capacity to tap the intellectual power of these people through proper engagements? Is our economy able to generate requisite jobs for them? Is there a proper solution to the growing joblessness?

Some numbers are worth looking at. The numbers coming from our universities vis-à-vis economic growth and population growth is important. Last week, the University of Nairobi alone had over 8,000 graduands. Egerton and Masinde Muliro University, too, had a good number.

Indications are that the mass of the human resource which is not gainfully engaged in Kenya is immense. Much as it is painful to see graduates roaming the streets searching for jobs, the problem is even bigger. Those on the streets at least have some relatively high level skills to sell. There are many more with no skills or low skills for that matter. They have little to sell or just their physical ability to work. It is not possible to build a decent economy when the  majority are not gainfully productive.

So the focus should be what we should do to utilise the human resource capacity we are endowed with? Indeed as the studies of developed nations and fast developing ones have proved, utilisation of the human resource in an intelligent way plays the trick to make a country rich and powerful resulting to offering quality life.

There is need to tap and develop more utilisable resources. In a nutshell, the large number of graduates may be impressive but there is a lot of structural and futuristic issues to sort out immediately.