Storymoja helps youth pursue careers with new platform

Storymoja Publishers have been working more than four years to assemble a career encyclopedia that they hope will go a long way towards solving, or at least ameliorating, the problem of youth unemployment in Kenya today.

Previewing the final draft of Storymoja’s Careerpedia early last week in the presence of academics, school administrators and the media at Alliance Francaise, Story moja’s founder-publisher Muthoni Garland made a powerful case explaining why her company felt so keenly that Kenyan youth required incisive career guidance.

First and foremost, it was to address one of the country’s most critical problems, that of youth unemployment.

It’s a problem she said that reflects a terrible waste of priceless human potential. It’s also one that contributes to increased inequality, crime and insecurity, she added. Ms Garland noted that even university graduates have a hard time finding jobs.

Rapidly changing

There are clearly many macro- as well as micro-level issues contributing to Kenya’s high rate of youth unemployment, but in her view, most youth are ill-prepared for career success.

They rarely have adequate counselling in potential career paths that they might take; they also haven’t been trained in the sort of skills now required either to get good jobs in the formal sector or to start up small scale businesses of their own.

Often parental pressure for youth to pursue career paths that don’t suit their personality types or personal preferences can impede a child’s progress towards obtaining the essential skills required to obtain employment in our rapidly-changing Kenyan job market.

But also she said that parents, teachers, career counsellors and young people themselves may suffer from the lack of information, especially related to all the new sorts of jobs-both vocational as well as professional--that have opened up in the past few years.

That lack of information among the public at large is one reason Storymoja chose to not just fill in this knowledge gap by creating the 700 page encyclopedia.