Instil entrepreneurial traits in youth to end failure syndrome

This year, the number of students who scored mean grade of C- and below totalled 213,438.

That’s 60 per cent of students who sat the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) exams and despite their heightened levels of literacy, they have been deemed failures.

This statistic has been consistent for over seven years now which puts the number of exam failures at a staggering 1.5 million plus.

What we are focusing on this year is a mere tip of the iceberg.

Yet, we can find the solution to this burgeoning problem by empowering our students emotionally as well as intellectually.

Skills here should be understood as emotional as well as intellectual (technical) and opportunity as an enabling environment (infrastructure and schools, for instance) and not the much touted yet narrow sense of just direct creation of formal jobs.

It is unrealistic to expect a government to consistently generate jobs commensurate to the secondary and tertiary graduates joining the labour market.

In any case, expecting a government to offer all the solutions only serves to develop a culture of dependency.

How can our education create a mentality of abundance in our students, and not one of scarcity?

We must start approaching education as meant for empowerment not employment; for life, not examination.

This way even as the student progresses through life she is being filled with the possibility of opportunities that exist for her, and not just the one: “go to school, pass your exams, get to university and get a job”

Among the ways this would be achieved is by appealing to their emotional part of the brain and inculcating character traits which we discover in our adult life as intrinsic to success, yet sadly are not captured in the education curriculum: confidence, high self esteem, belief in self, focus, positive attitude, setting and achieving goals, to name a few; in tandem with this would be entrepreneurship as a way of life.

Many are the university and college graduates, with a degree or six-month certificate, who expect the paper earned to work for them.

You’ve heard it said many times: “I’ll do a six month course in IT and apply for a job; I have been tarmacking for five years and yet I have a degree; I need to do a Masters for me to be bumped up a grade; I’ll do my undergraduate, Masters and PhD, and be through with education before I apply for a job”.

Personal development has been narrowed to only getting another certificate, yet this is only intellectual development, and requires commensurate emotional development to give it substance.