Build human capital for skilled jobs

During the country’s biggest building programme since independence, the building dividend to Kenyans is minimal.

Yet, at root, sits a single unsolved issue. Kenya has too few plumbers, electricians, painters, steel fitters, tile layers, joiners, masons and welders, and we cannot organise ourselves to train them.

Youngsters from low-income homes triple their incomes when they start bricklaying. Make it as a top-grade electrician, and they can move into the country’s top three per cent of earners.

That ends the poverty for their families and creates many more jobs and incomes from their spending capacity.

Yet, builders are finding it so hard to get skilled artisans they get delayed, quality is impaired, work needs to be redone and their earnings and spending suffer too.

By contrast, the Chinese firms that are now winning the majority of our construction contracts can bring in their own welders or masons from China.

There’s a 30 percent local sourcing rule, which they aren’t observing, but, last year, they were told they could fulfil that just with materials. And the other 70 percent anyway flies overseas as a financial flow.

Yet the government has half-tried. Since 2018 it has been expanding technical and vocational training (TVET).

But it pays the trainers in skills like plumbing less than they can earn working as plumbers, so there are few trainers and the students exit with few skills.

Thus, most of the TVETs have swung to general business courses, fashion or cosmetics, which they can get instructors for.

Then, access to all these courses presents a nearly impossible barrier. The government cut the fees in 2018, from Sh92,000 a year to Sh56,420. But who can pay Sh56,420?

The informal sector accounts for 80 percent of our jobs, and 85 percent of informal jobs pay less than Sh15,000 a month. Few parents or unemployed youth could ever afford such a sum.

The government opened Higher Education Loans Board access, which then applied rules that loans nearly impossible to get.

Both parents of a student must be registered taxpayers. Kenya only has three million taxpayers in a population of 55 million, so the chances of both parents being in the one-in-nine in the formal sector, are slim. Then, those double formal-sector parents must earn insufficient to cover the fees.

Then, the student must also find a guarantor (have you ever tried that yourself?). And then they only get part of the fees, and most still find around Sh30,000.

It’s a plan, keeping unemployed youth and skilled instructors out of skills training, but it is costing us billions in lost gross domestic product now, and ahead.

And who will use all those roads and buildings without skills and jobs?