A family watching a movie. Government’s recording facilities, ‘Studio
Mashinani’ is fitted with high quality equipment. FILE PHOTO | NMG
Summary
- Studio Mashinani is taking recording studios to the grassroots where the majority of talented youth live.
- Five studios comprising two in Nairobi, one each in Machakos, Mombasa and Kisumu have been completed and plans are under way to eventually spread out to all the counties.
- The studios are fitted with modern high quality recording equipment.
Last Friday, I inaugurated a recording
studio at Koma-Rock area of Matungulu constituency in Machakos County
that signalled the start and activation of grassroots studios in three
other counties to stimulate creativity.
Studio
Mashinani, as the name suggests, is a project through which the
government is taking recording studios to the grassroots where the
majority of talented youth live.
Five studios
comprising two in Nairobi, one each in Machakos, Mombasa and Kisumu have
been completed and plans are under way to eventually spread out to all
the counties.
The studios are fitted with modern high quality recording equipment.
The
inspiration behind the Studio Mashinani concept is that Kenya has
enormous creativity and unexploited talent and the missing link is the
lack of, and in some cases inaccessibility to opportunities for the
youth to exploit their potential.
Many of our talented
youth come from poor backgrounds and cannot afford the high cost of
producing and recording their music and other creative content in
commercial studios.
Studio Mashinani seeks to bridge
this gap by providing modern equipment and mentorship as well as access
to platforms that can enable them to commercialise their productions.
Studio Mashinani leverages on talent as an asset that
can pay, hence the mantra Talent ni Kazi, and that if properly
harnessed, the creative energy and artistry of the youth can turn around
their fortunes.
Indeed, the creative economy has huge
career prospects that Kenya can exploit to sustain the livelihoods of
our talented youth, having generated business empires through
entertainment ecosystems such as America’s Hollywood, India’s Bollywood,
Nigeria’s Nollywood and now our very own Riverwood.
Studio
Mashinani is an intervention that demonstrates government focus on
alternative and innovative ways of creating job opportunities for the
youth considering that only 70,000 out of the 800,000 young people who
enter the Kenyan job market annually succeed in securing professional
employment in the formal sector. The rest join the “Kibarua” workforce
and hustle for their day-to-day needs.
The creative
sector has generated business empires around the world through
development and sustenance of entertainment ecosystems such as America’s
Hollywood, India’s Bollywood, Nigeria’s Nollywood and now our very own
Riverwood.
Studio Mashinani makes it affordable to
produce, record and eventually popularise and commercialise talents from
all over the country through KBC’s newly launched youth dedicated
television channel (Y254) and other digital platforms.
We
envisage that the creative productions by local artists will increase
supply to the demand for local content by Kenyan broadcast stations.
The
content produced will also boost the efforts by broadcast stations to
comply with the statutory 45 to 60 per cent requirement for local
content which will in turn increase their revenue.
The
Studio Mashinani Project is part of the Ajira Digital Program – a
broader initiative that provides a remarkable digital solution to youth
unemployment in Kenya.
The programme seeks to
introduce Kenya’s unemployed youth to online work, providing training,
resources and infrastructure that they require to be successful in the
digital workspace. I encourage the youth to visit the Ajira portal
www.ajiradigital.go.ke, and register.
The online work
sector has huge promise for solving the unemployment challenge. Already
some 40,000 Kenyans earn a living through online work.
The
government is leveraging on this opportunity to scale up the numbers
and has invested heavily in awareness creation, sensitisation and
training
To facilitate Ajira’s digital solution to
unemployment, the government has committed to provide free Wi-Fi,
high-speed Internet connectivity and digital devices in all the 290
constituencies through the Constituency Innovation Hubs project in
collaboration with Members of Parliament.
We encourage the MPs to sign up and allow their constituents to also access free Wi-Fi and faster Internet speeds.
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