Stanbic Bank starts offering youth with practical skills
Youth queue for Prisons Service jobs in Lira recently. Stanbic Bank will provide youth with practical skills that will enable them become entrepreneurs and create jobs. PHOTO BY Hudson Apunyo
Youth unemployment rate is really high not only in Uganda but the world over. According to ILO, young people are three times more likely to be unemployed than adults and almost 73 million youth worldwide are looking for work. Statistics in Uganda suggest that 83 per cent of people fewer than 24 years are unemployed yet more than two thirds of Uganda’s population is below the age of 24. Because of these happenings, Stanbic Bank has partnered with Junior Achievement Uganda to empower the youth in acquiring entrepreneurial skills at an early age so that they become job providers rather than job seekers.
Stanbic’s head of Corporate Social Investment, shares: “Stanbic Bank role will be to provide the youth with practical skills that will enable them become entrepreneurs and create jobs”.
“We have created business clubs in schools that will each develop a company and products or services to trade in,” she noted.
During this exercise, Stanbic and JA will organise an innovation camp to facilitate students to come up with business ideas and identifying individual potential. They have so far enroll 30 schools, out of these they have formulate at least 25 clubs in these schools that will each have a business/company.
At least 2,000 students and 100 teachers are expected to benefit from the entrepreneurship skills.
Regional competitions will be organize to showcase the businesses created and this will be concluded by the national competition by end of 2014
