Recent reports indicate up to 40 percent of Kenya’s 17 million youth are unemployed. Only about 10 percent are gainfully engaged. The rest hassle between underemployment and joblessness.
The riddle of our time is that despite vast amounts of resources available in this computer age, the youth face unprecedented employment and social crises.
The majority of young people are alienated from the means of production; natural and infrastructural capital and even technology itself that feed the primary industries. An ageing generation own control and clings on them like leaches.
The hope still lies in technology, particularly the software end of the chain.
Technological hardware and the corresponding infrastructure; the Apples, the IBMs and Compaq’s of this world are owned by the old generation, mostly in their 70s. The youth is just end consumers. How?
The old guard owns vast amount of resources which they use to influence policy, politics and virtually everything else in life.
This partly explains why we are still paying dearly for unreliable internet connectivity. Luckily, the youth dominates the software and the entrepreneurial spirit in technology.
That’s why ‘social media’ is so popular among them. If you look carefully, the fastest growing ICT segments are in the software.
Recent economic reports still show that agriculture is the fastest growing sector in Kenya.
Most likely the youth are concentrating in the off-farm activities, away from the strict patriarchal control on production. The youth may not own land, but they dominate value adding; processing, packaging and transport.
They excel in the tertiary industries, the mostly ‘intangible software’ side of the value chain, where the old guard lack the knowhow; for instance, in e-commerce.
The future of youth employment lies not in owning the technology hardware per se, but in exploiting the entrepreneurial opportunities it offers.
The most popular social media sites and search engines were invented by youths in their twenties and thirties. Sergey Brin was only 21 years old when he invented google. Other young entrepreneurs who used existing technology to make a mark are Mark Zuckerberg for Facebook, Bill Gates for Microsoft, Jerry Yang and David Filo for Yahoo!, Brian Acton and Jan Koum for Whatsapp, or Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger for Instagram.
There are limitless opportunities for the youthful entrepreneur with the savvy to use the ever evolving technology to create jobs.
Entrepreneurship in ICT should be much easier than in agriculture because youngsters today are socialised with the ICT as an essential component. For them, the space between the virtual and real ‘realities’ is blurred, so that to many of them, the default reality is the computer generated one.
The virtual ‘reality’ offer ready, rapidly varying stimuli. It acts as a refuge from the banality of a reality dominated by an older conservative generation, making the youth more comfortable with the ever changing technology.
Of course we can’t ignore the negative side of technology. Cambridge University reports that for every hour spent on electronic gadgets, a kid drops two grades in school.
But this is all fodder for job creation in their thousands. Imagine the spill-over for psychologists, sociologists, etc. who must deal with these problems.
After all, inventions always impact negatively or positively on the society. In technology positive possibilities cancel the negatives. Forget CDs, DVDs or flash-disks and streaming.
These are ‘so last century’ as the youth say. The possibilities run from reality to fiction, into a future called ‘singularity’ where machines may control humans.
Stay informed. Subscribe to our newsletter
We are entering the brave new world of artificial intelligence, machine learning and the ‘Internet of things’ (IoT), interlinking of ‘everything’ including chips under your skin connected to a medical lab to monitory your temperature.
The refrigerator linked to the phone to tell you which stock is running low. Analysts say this market will be worth between one and three trillion dollars by 2030.
In general technology, recent invention of a material called ‘graphene’ comes to mind. It is being touted as the best conductor of electricity ever invented. At one atom thick, one has to squeeze the eyes to see it, yet it is 300 times tougher than steel. A kilo of it can spread on a football pitch. The implication? Think of foldable TVs, roll-up electronic newspapers, clothes that charge phones, electronic paints, and phones that charge once a month for a few seconds!
Another just unrolling invention is the 3D printing. Soon, entrepreneurs will not need to import toys, artificial limbs or mannequins. Printers are coming with the capacity to print your photo in three dimensions.
Someone in the US recently printed a gun and another one a car! Soon buildings will be ‘printed’ this way, not built block by block.
With these possibilities in technology, who needs agriculture for employment?
The Standard Group Plc is a
multi-media organization with investments in media platforms spanning newspaper
print operations, television, radio broadcasting, digital and online services. The
Standard Group is recognized as a leading multi-media house in Kenya with a key
influence in matters of national and international interest.
join