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Youth business skills scheme introduced
2006-11-05 09:42:21
By Beatrice Philemon and Austin Beyadi
The University of Dar es Salaam Entrepreneurship Centre (UDEC) has embarked on a programme of providing education of entrepreneurship skills to youths and other people in the country after observing that most people become idle after completing their studies.
The Director of UDEC, Dr Donath Olomi, made the remarks recently at a workshop on reporting entrepreneurship skills organised for journalists drawn from various media outlets in the city.
He said in order to assist youth and other people to recognise the importance of entrepreneurship for success in business, such training would be provided several times in several groups in the country. These would include SMEs operators, workers, students, and retirees.
Dr. Olomi said the training aims at building capacity in the society, by way of enabling the trainees start and run businesses.
They would furthermore become entrepreneurs and cultivate a self- employment culture, he added.
Currently a number of youths in the country are roaming the streets looking for employment due to the lack of entrepreneurship knowledge .
The youths, he pointed out, were also captive to the belief that employment was available only in government institutions and private firms.
”Such training will make them eradicate the belief and replace it with the conviction that employment can be created by anybody,” he stressed.
A part from that he said if such training was conducted across the country, labour migration from the countryside to urban centres would be greatly reduced.
Furthermore, he added, entrepreneurs are highly valued in today’s world, because it calls for constant improvement, aggressiveness, vision, and ability to assess risks and quickly take action.
According to Dr, Ulomi, right now many countries, including the US and European Union (EU) members, recognise the importance of entrepreneurship for success in business, economic growth and vitality, competitiveness, and in all other endeavours.
He further explained that those countries are committed to and are investing in developing enterprising behaviour within and outside the school and higher education system.
”You know we need to educate youth and other people on this because, currently Small and Medium Enterprise Development Policy (2003-2013) recognise the importance of enterprising behaviour and commit us to develop including ”mainstreaming entrepreneurship” in the curricula” said Dr Olomi.
The Faculty of Commerce and Management and then Faculty of Engineering were the pioneers, he said, adding that in the late 1990\’, increasing graduate unemployment lead to the need to find ways of producing graduates who could employ themselves and hopefully create jobs for others.
Hence in 1999, the University set a strategic objective of producing job creators rather than just job seekers.
”As a result, in 2004/05, about 75 per cent of final year students say they are very interested in starting own business,” he reported.
Also in 2004/05, 16 per cent of final year students reported that they were running own business as they study and this was up from 7 per cent in 1997/98.
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