After a successful beginning, the Youth Fund is set to receive more funds from institutions seeking to improve life for 13 million unemployed youth.

The Youth Enterprise Fund is earning accolades for its sustainability seen in its revolving kitty that has recorded impressive repayments during the second year of operation.

Fund chief executive Umuro Wario said a recovery rate of 95 per cent, in line with those recorded by microfinance lenders like Kenya Women Finance Trust and K-Rep Bank, was realised on the Sh858 million lent out previously.

He said Sh250 million of proceeds from previous loans had been lent out again, in the first official audit of the fund’s performance.

The fund disburses loans to youth groups with viable proposals for venturing into enterprise at an interest rate of eight per cent.

The money is advanced through appointed banks which remit one per cent of the interest income to the Fund for administration, research and policy formulation.

The fund also gets operational finance from the Treasury which allocated Sh500 million for the next fiscal year, out of which Sh25 million will be for meeting recurrent needs.

Under its three year strategic plan running to 2011, the fund aims at having a self sustaining fund of Sh5 billion.

Despite the small Treasury allocations, Mr Wario said commercial banks had indicated interest in venturing into the model with the aim of cashing in on the high recoveries.

“There are good indicators that the new partnership between the fund and the private sector is going to unlock substantial financing for youth enterprise,” Mr Wario said.

The fund, which was made a parastatal last year, has now recruited its own staff and shifted to a new office at National Bank Building.
Previously, the fund was relying on staff seconded from the Ministry of Finance.

Critics had feared the fund would turn into another milk - cow because of the high risks associated with the borrowers, many of them convenience vehicles crafted to take advantage of the funds by first time businessmen.

This handicap forced financial intermediaries disbursing the loans to employ strict vetting criteria for the business plans, knocking out those whose viability could not be assured.

During the initial face, good business proposals were left out due to demands for collateral. Mr Wario says the implementation strategy has been revised since then, to benefit more applicants.The new approach, he says, focuses on the needs of borrowers and the environment informing their operations. The fund has a potential client base of 13 million youths who are unemployed.

Because of the low injections from government, Mr Wario said there is need to increase private sector financing through innovative ways where lenders own the project in equity with the borrowers and provide funds and technical advice.

This would knock out the need for collateral. Already the Fund is in talks with the Canadian government and Enablis East Africa, a venture capital fund based there, whose conclusion may see the firm provide Sh850 million to the Youth Enterprise Fund in the next five years.

Mr Wario said that several fund raising initiatives were being followed locally with the private sector as well as donors. Other issues identified in the strategic plan were facilitation of product marketing, employment of the youth and capacity enhancement financed by the fund.

Written by Githua Kihara

Barrack Obama is not the first famous Kenyan to have made it in the US, but he might be the only one who retained his Kenyan name while many others americanised theirs. Here is a sample of those Kenyans who made it big in the US but changed their names to become more 'Americans.'

They include: Clarence Carter, Billy Ocean , Barry White, and Otis Redding.

Alicia Keys real name is Alice Akinyi, then we have Billy Ochieng, who changed his name to Billy Ocean once he hit the American shores; and Otis Redding whose real name is Otieno Rading, comes from the Kisumu.
Brian Mac Otieno was Brian Mc night

Note they are all Luos

There may be others out there, but these are the ones who came to my mind immediately. Something common with these Kenyans is that they were/are all great musicians. If they went into politics like Obama, perhaps they would have retained their Kenyan tags. If they were preachers, they would have changed their minimally like Martin Oludhe King who changed to Martin Luther King and T.D. Jaoko who became T.D. Jakes.

Establishment of HIV/Aids policies at the workplace has helped developing countries to make progress in the fight against the pandemic, a new International Labour Organisation report says.

The report says these policies have been drivers of attitude change at the workplace with a number of employees adopting habits that are supportive to co-workers living with the virus.

In Kenya, corporate chiefs added impetus to the fight against HIV/Aids when they took public HIV tests aiming to reposition testing as yet another weapon in the fight against the disease.

The new report, ‘Saving lives, Protecting jobs,’ tracks changes in attitudes related to HIV at the workplace and presents good practices and data collected from workplaces, ministries of labour, employers’ and workers’ organisations.

To bridge the statistical gap that has made it difficult for Kenya to measure the economic impact of HIV/Aids to companies, the Federation of Kenya Employers (FKE) says it has developed a monitoring tool that its members will use to come up with the numbers.

The tool captures the total number of illnesses and the total cost to business of such illnesses. The aim is to help organisations come up with plans to mitigate impact.

Publication of this report comes five months after the National Aids Control Council (NACC), the government arm steering the fight against the disease, announced that HIV prevalence had dropped from 5.9 per cent in 2005 to 5.1 per cent last year.

An estimated 1.4 million people are living with HIV and Aids in Kenya. This includes 934,000 people aged between 15 and 49 years.

Statistics also show that at least 1.8 million children have been orphaned by the disease since it was first diagnosed in Kenya in the early 1980s.

Labour sector researchers say absenteeism and turnover, loss of skills and declining morale that accompany HIV/Aids has the ultimate impact of increasing costs to employers and at the same time slowing down growth of profitability.

In recognition of the critical role that testing plays in managing the spread of Aids, NACC has set a target of having 80 per cent of Kenyans tested by 2010.

Dr Sophia Kisting, the Director of the ILO’s programme on HIV/Aids and the world of work, says a number of people have made significant progress in using the workplace as a platform for prevention, care and support as well as to tackle stigma and discrimination.

Over the past four years, the ILO has gathered data from managers and workers at partner workplaces in six pilot countries to measure the impact of HIV/Aids and non-discrimination policies.

Benin, Cambodia, Ghana, Guyana and Togo are listed as countries where workers attitudes towards people living with HIV have greatly improved.

In Ghana, the percentage of workers who reported having a supportive attitude towards co-workers living with HIV increased from 33 to 63.

In all the six countries surveyed, the proportion of workers who reported supportive behaviour towards co-workers living with the virus rose from 49 per cent to 63 per cent.

Attitude towards condom use also improved considerably in most countries with Cambodia recording the highest margin of improvement from 34 per cent rate of use to 68 per cent.

Workers who reported using condoms with non-regular partners rose from 74 per cent to 84 per cent.

The recorded changes in behaviour is partly attributed to increased access to HIV prevention services.

In the impact survey, it was found that 76 per cent of the participating enterprises had written HIV policies.

The ILO report shows that employers’ and workers’ organisations are increasingly using the ILO’s Code of Practice on HIV/Aids to develop policies and practices for the workplace.

Success in developing HIV policies is firmly rooted in collaboration between workers and their employers.

Overall, 16 of the 24 countries where the Strategic HIV/Aids Responses in Enterprises (SHARE), an international workplace education programme, is implementing projects have adopted a national tripartite policy or declaration on HIV and the world of work.

With 33.2 million people officially reported to be living with HIV/Aids globally — the majority of them in their most productive years — the workplace is thought offer a unique entry point for addressing the disease.

The findings, however, have faulted Kenya, saying its Aids policies at the workplace are disjointed