Opportunity Youth: When an Opportunity Isn't Enough

Our welders from TVET A, let's call them Wadzomba. Wadzomba were, in many ways, the real definition of opportunity youth.

Some came from disadvantaged homes. For some, this was part of the reason they ended up in blue-collar jobs.I wish that did not matter anymore once they had an opportunity at our wheelbarrow factory.

It was almost like someone told them: "Your sixty seconds of fame starts NOW!"

First off, they refused to operate without ten o'clock tea.The owner thought a cup of tea should not grind the factory to a halt. At this point, they were better at complaining than welding.

So he asked their supervisor to make sure there was black tea every day.

Let me make it very clear there was no milk in the tea, I also assumed it does not matter. Scrap that imagination of an office pantry with milk in the fridge.

Welcome to this part of Africa.

My guys complained that the tea did not meet their standards and it did not come with snacks. The factory owner was shocked. Apparently, not shocked enough.

He started experimenting with different snacks. We also thought this should work well as an incentive, right? Wrong!

What started as an incentive ended up not meeting the welder’s standard. Some welders started running out of bus fare. Little by little, attendance started dropping.

At this point, I need to introduce you to Welder 01. He left training and went for a funeral.He took two weeks.Yes, I was also wondering what takes so long in a burial.

If I was alone in the savannah and I had to bury the tallest animal, say a giraffe, would it take me two weeks?

Anyway, some had excuses for not showing up. Some didn't.

What was painful was that our best welder in the lot had to quit because he travelled more than 20 kilometres to the factory. I came to learn that the cost of travel is a major barrier to opportunity youth.

I was ready to pay his fare out of my own pocket. Not that he was reachable. Lesson number two working with opportunity youth:

They can be hard to reach.

Not hard. Sometimes impossible. Did I eventually get to know why?

Yes. I found out some of the reasons.

Some got their first SIM card from their parents or guardians. This was aggravated by delays in getting IDs.

If the SIM card gets lost, they replace it with a new one registered under their own name. Good luck trying to reach them.

Then there are smartphones.

A recent ecosystem mapping showed more than 90% smartphone penetration among young people in Mombasa.

That probably deserves a full post, with statistics on data usage and maybe a collaboration with GSMA. But here is the funny part. You would think smartphones make opportunity youth easier to reach.

Sometimes they make them harder to reach.

Batteries drain faster.

Software malfunctions.

No airtime.

SIM cards change.

"My cousin took my phone for the day."

And the worst one:

"It was blocked because I was unable to pay!" (There is a daily fee for buy-now-pay-later smart phones)

More about that in a future post. I wish lack of motivation never stood between an opportunity youth and what seemed to me like a promising economic opportunity.

For most times, it did. One youth simply stopped going to work.For no good reason.

You know what they say about motivation? Some days you find the motivation.Some days motivation finds you.

There is a meme that goes with this, with a cyclist being chased by a bear.Let's just say there are no bears in Mombasa.

Too bad, our opportunity youth could not be found by “the motivation”.

But the more I worked with them, the more I realized that it wasn't always as simple as laziness. Opportunity youth face many barriers.

Some have been through unhealed trauma. Sometimes it appears like when an opportunity finally appears, something pulls them back. Some lose loved ones along the way. They lose the people who were their support and pillars.

Some choose a short-term paying job over a longer-term opportunity. Some decide much later that they are simply not interested in that career anymore.

They want to become social media influencers now.

And honestly, who am I to judge?

At this point, it appeared like nothing was working. But something did. That became our next experiment. The lesson was becoming clearer:

An opportunity is not really an opportunity if a young person cannot afford to take it, sustain it or even stay connected to it.

More on what worked in the next post.