Stakeholders have called for the launch of intensive regional marketing campaigns in Embu County of Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) institutions and courses on offer, failure to which the county’s access to scholarship funding from the national government will be low.
Right Reverend Lincoln Mwaniki of Joyspring Church Kiamuringa in the county expressed dissatisfaction at the low rate of awareness on benefits of the courses offered among school leavers.
He noted that the trend was not promising for future availability of technical manpower needed to meet emerging and potentially lucrative local and international industries.
Despite campaigns by the church to popularize the various courses offered to school leavers, Rev. Mwaniki said that levels of hesitance were worrying and there was need for concerted efforts among stakeholders to create awareness.
He said that the Church was preparing more programmes through which direct campaigns would bring on board instructors and experts from various TVET colleges.
Chiefs and their assistants, the clergy suggested, needed to launch campaigns first to find out the reason behind failure to pursue technical courses.
A second-year plumbing trainee at Jeremiah Nyagah Rwika Technical Institute Derick Munene confessed that many of his peers continued to outrightly refuse to apply for the courses due to bad company, drug abuse and alcohol abuse.
“I have close friends who have grades which can allow them to pursue very good and potential technical courses, but whenever I market such courses to them they refuse to even listen to me,” said Munene, adding that some of them earned income from Muguka farming and assumed the crop would be profitable forever.
He said that when some of the friends quoted fees as a problem and he offered to guide them on how to apply for HELB loans, they hesitated and postponed their applications. He however revealed that more young women in the county embraced the technical courses compared to men.
Rev. Mwaniki noted that the low output of skilled youth from the county would result to reduced numbers of technicians in the government’s housing projects.
A sizeable number of the other youth suitable for TVET courses, elders in Mbeere said, served as casual workers in construction sites after refusing to pursue training.
Large numbers of the prospective trainees confessed to being ignorant of the courses including the shorter options which last for less than a year.
Generally, school leavers and parents revealed that hesitance to pursue the courses was based on fear that the fees charged by the institutions was high and unaffordable and therefore not worth trying.
“Some of us parents struggled to take our children through primary and secondary school and faced with what we fear to be high fees in TVET, we hesitate and leave the young men and women to pursue income under casual employment,” said Mr. Festus Ireri, a parent of two school leavers from Kiamuringa who work as casual laborers.
Mbeere North and South sub counties are the worst affected, with most enticed towards an easy lifestyle encouraged by ease of earning income linked to the farming of Muguka, whose proceeds they spend in acquisition and abuse of narcotics and third generation alcohol.
By Robert Nyagah
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