Samson Mwandara, 29, hails from Kiteere Central Division, in Fort Portal. Mwandara is the second last born in a family of 10 children. He graduated in 2022 with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Agriculture at Mountain of the Moon University. Searching for a job was one of the hardest tasks he was confronted with, after graduation. Mwandara says he needed a job to support himself and his single mother who had toiled for years to educate him and other children. This was after the cruel hand of death grabbed their loving and caring father, at the time when they needed him most.

Fortunately, the long journey of job hunting was cut short when he was selected to participate in the Work Readiness Programme at Honda Enterprises Limited, where his skills were polished. After the six months of training elapsed, he was retained by Honda Enterprises.

“It is not easy to get a job in the Uganda of today. I must say that it was a blessing for me to be retained after the training. My friends are still struggling to get jobs yet I’m earning a living, who am I?” he says.

Official government estimates indicate that between 600,000- 700,000 people in Uganda join the labour market every year and 95 percent of these are youth, yet hardly 10 percent can be absorbed in the formal labour market due to lack of the required skills.

In 2021, the Uganda National Bureau of Statistics (UNBS) reported that youth unemployment for persons between 18 and 30 years increased from 12.7 percent in 2012/13 to 13.0 percent in 2019/20, despite a reduction in the overall national unemployment rate, from 11.1 percent to 10 percent during the same period.

Today, Mwandara’s future is bright. He plans to use the skills he acquired to set up his own poultry farm. He hopes to start with 500 birds. To make his dream a reality, he saves Shs 200,000 every month to raise capital for his proposed project. He says the training helped him to acquire the knowledge needed for one to mint money from poultry farming. According to him, he is now an expert in making poultry feeds for both layers and broilers. For layers, he mixes 200kgs of brown maize, 150kg of maize brand, 100kgs of KLC lime, and while for broilers, he mixes 300kgs of brown maize, 100kgs of maize brand and 100kgs of KBC Koudiz. He says that producing the right quality and quantity of poultry feeds results in good quality birds. Mwandara is also an expert in silage production.

“The training has been so good that I acquired so many skills. I wish we could have such training for all graduates, their future would be brighter. It is a fact that universities are not doing enough when it comes to the practical part of training. It is one of the causes of unemployment among the youth. They have papers but they cannot do the jobs assigned to them,” he says.