9) TRAINING WITH THE YOUTHS

After our first week of activities in Kabula Primary school, we were about to start a training course with the youth. In kenya, the "youth" is a term used to describe people aged between 18 and 35. For the country this represents a big potential which unfortunately is not fully exploited.

We had already met some of the youth of Kabula since our arrival but one day we went and met more of them in a meeting they had organized. This meetings take place once a month and alllow youth to exchange ideas about their issues for which they try to find solutions.

The main issue in the community that was raised (on top of poverty) was to find a way to generate revenue and get a plan to leave the sugar canne business. Indeed, sugar canne is not profitable at all for the community. Almost all the families have contracts with big firms that enables them to raise sugar canne in a particular piece of land. However, this land doesn't belong to them, plus the profit is not big enough to make the community self-sufficient. It doesn't even give a family enough money to feed themselves. All the contracts were to end soon and the development of new projects was not easy to find or to carry out financially.

The meeting we went to was really interesting, not only because it could stress all the issues mentionned above but also because it was a good introduction for the training we had to organize for the youth.

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In the picture below : the classroom where the training took place. We were lend this place by a high school which was also a boarding school. It was situated in the other part of Kabula village where they had access to electricity. However, even if the material was still really basic, at least they had chair and tables.

So as you could understand part of our work with BOHAPO was to give tuitions to young adults. The training was about entrepreneurship. It consisted in making youth aware of what it takes to create a project and was aimed at finding a realistic business that could be profitable for them. We would prepare the course with books beforehand but we were not due to bring them profound and technical knowledge as we were starting from zero. The most important was to motivate them and make them understand all the steps required to create a sustainable project.

BOHAPO informed the community that a training was to take place with us and they appointed some volunteers to attend the course. They chose one young adult in each area of the village depending on his motivation to participate in a final project. Before starting, I was wondering if the course would bring something new to students and the community but finally, one could feel really useful which is really a big thing when you go volunteering.










Students were really motivated and so grateful to us. We got to know each other as the days went by and the activities in groups (like how to make a business plan) were successful.

Amongst the final projects proposed for the community we had to pick the most realistic and profitable one so as to make it happen.
The 4 projects with more support from the students were : motorbike business, dairy farming, poultry keeping and bee keeping.
After long discussions about pros and cons we finally picked the poultry farm project.

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Then during the training, Edwin got the idea to make a computer course for the students. It would just be an introduction to show them how a computer worked. So someone brought his own computer and I could teach them the basics.

Actually for many of them it was the first time they saw a computer and some couldn't even make the difference between a computer and a TV.

First I had to give them a general presentation to make them understand why people use computer in business or at home. Students who never used it came to the desk and gave it a try. It was just about how to move the mouse and make a right / left click ! They were all really happy about the experience and they also told me this first contact with computers was really meaning a lot to them.

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People from the Bank also came to visit us. They did a presentation on how to open a bank account and the importance of making savings even with not much money. Obviously, the majority of people in Kabula didn't have any bank account...

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At the end of the training, students were all given a certificate from BOHAPO that testified their attendance at the course. A few of them are pictured below.

And now the nominees are...





















Now the complete team ;-)

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On the pictures below : the day we picked up some wood to make the fence for the poultry farm.


















Below: some days later when we went back to the coumpound to see the evolution of the poultry project that was taking form. Thanks to the donations BOHAPO could sponsor the training and the final project. The fence and the poultry farm was being built by some of the students.