“I felt embarrassed to be a girl and felt like it was a punishment,” recalls…
Kayt transforming the lives of young people in karamoja
My name is Yovan, I am from Alula cell, Kiru town council, Abim district. For a long time, our community has had to contend with the youth problem, a blanket term to refer to the challenges young people in this community struggle with. On the surface, it is easy to dismiss these challenges as manifestations of laziness, drug abuse, Unemployment, cattle rustling or lack of foresight but when you live here as I have, you realize that the youths are simply a mirror of the situation in our community. Often our youth will be found indulging in gambling, substance abuse and petty crimes like theft of goats, chicken among others.
All these are regrettable habits, but they are offshoots of a bigger problem: idleness spawned out of unemployment, early marriage, and high rates of school dropout among young people. The social chaos is how my fellow youth are trying to cope and escape from our shared realities. My community was for many years plagued by war and cattle rustling by the Karamojong warriors. when peace was restored through the disarmaments that occurred in 2006 and 2007, we all hoped that life would return to normal, that we would go back to tending to our gardens, rearing our animals, and raising our children. What we forgot was that our children had been denied access to education due to the instability in the region, coupled with poverty since our cattle were stolen by our brothers the Karamojong warriors.
For many of our youth, the handout reliance mindset had been locked in they all expected to be given handouts. Youth livelihood program funds were consumed by youth groups who believed the government was mandated to give them free money. This is why Karamoja Action for Youth Transformation has been a revelation in our quest to transform the lives of young people.
KAYT has worked with several youth groups and trained many young people in Karamoja in a bid to amplify youth voices and increase their influence in community transformation unill these community challenges are resolved.
In my parish, six groups were formed and fortunately I was one of the beneficiaries. We were given several vocational trainings like commercial farming of high value crops and vegetables, making of liquid soap, shoe making, apiculture among others. We were also trained on financial management and then encouraged to embrace VSLAs which I am a member up to now.
Together with my few friends we embraced bricks laying and all the money that we got from the sale of bricks, we used to buy improved breeds of pigs and as you can see, so far, we have 56 pigs, and we also hope to embrace poultry farming.
I cannot express my gratitude enough for KAYT’s insistence on effective coordination of the project from the district level and at the lower and local level. KAYT’s outlook is centred around consultation, consideration and engagement of local leaders which is demonstrative of willingness to work together for the betterment of our youths. KAYT has tirelessly worked towards giving our youths a second chance at life. In the past, the concept of economically empowered youth was alien but with the work KAYT has invested in our youths, we are beginning to see change in our community.
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