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Oeganda
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.
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