Financial institutions urged to support youth businesses

By The guardian reporter

Minister of State, Prime Minister�s Office (Investment and Empowerment), Dr Mary Nagu,

The government has urged financial institutions to join hands in supporting young Tanzanians through newly established programme known as Youth Business Tanzania (YBT), to enable them to access loans to establish business.The call was made by the Minister of State, Prime Minister’s Office (Investment and Empowerment), Dr Mary Nagu, during the launch of Youth Business Tanzania (Kijana Jiajiri) which is a national programme for young entrepreneurs.

The programme will be implemented jointly by the National Economic Empowerment Council NEEC, Youth Business International (YBI) from the UK and Tanzania Entrepreneurship Competiveness Centre (TECC) after they signed MoU to implement it.

She said access to finance has become a hindrance to access to capital by majority of Tanzanians and it is worse for the underserved youth who do not posses collateral for back up of bank loans, making it hard for them to start up business by relying on traditional bank loans.

“I am therefore delighted to hear that there are consultations going on with some financial institutions of facilitating access to concessional finance for the Kijana Jiajiri Programme graduates, youth are most affected by extreme poverty, lack of employment and poor health we must help them,” Dr Nagu said.

She said some studies indicated that youth unemployment has continued to increase and remain at extremely high levels despite considerable efforts to promote sustainable development by government and international development agencies.

“This phenomenon has contributed among others to the rise of youths social and economic problems to cite a few such as drug abuse, excessive alcoholism,, formation of youths delinquent  gangs that engage in antisocial or illegal behaviors such as theft , rape and murder,” she said.

In his speech, the Executive secretary of NEEC, Dr Anaclet Kashuliza, said in order to mitigate the trend of increasing unemployment in the country, especially for the youth, there is need to promote self-employment programmes, where youths with entrepreneurial talent are encouraged to establish businesses so that they can employ themselves and where possible to provide employment opportunities for others. He said majority of youths in Tanzania are unable to establish and run own businesses. There are many reasons including lack of skills and business training.