KAMPALA —A group of youth and their umbrella organization, National Youth Advocacy Platform (NYAP) want Ugandan Parliament to push a legislative agenda to push for youthful affairs.
The youth group on Wednesday rallied the Members of Parliament during an maiden interaction with members of the Parliamentary Forum on Youth Affairs of the 11th Parliament most of whom are new MPs especially the Youth legislators.
James Mumbere, the groups National Coordinator told reporters that the engagement with Members of Parliament is aimed at ensuring that the new legislators commit to advocating for the youth in their legislation for the period of five years.
“We have new MPs who just came into office early this year, we the youth actors on the other side didn’t seem to know each other. We are here to highlight and amplify the agenda of the youth among the MPs that have subscribed to be members of the Parliamentary Forum on Youth Affairs for the next five years to push for the youth agenda as a legislative agenda that they will amplify in the course of their legislation for the next five years,” Mumbere told journalists.
He added that in an event that young people are calling for support they should not be staggering but know the MPs that they must get in touch with those who have committed themselves to advocate for the youth in Parliament.
Membere observed that the platform is there to champion the issues for the youth by first of all building capacities of the youths so that they can ably go and participate from an informed point of view.
The youth noted that currently, there is a mismatch of the skill sets provided visa vie the development needs.
“Government is asking for investors to come and invest in Uganda but what skills do they find here, they find people that studied irrelevant topics and lessons in their institutions of learning. Can government strategically reshape the curriculum such that the skills provided are in line with the development needs,” the youth noted.
The meeting also discussed the need to advocating for development of agriculture skills among the youth in schools as well as the land rights for the youth.
On their part, Members of Parliament implored government to have a full a fledged Ministry incharge of youth affairs including demands and challenges.
Alex Brandon Kintu, Kagoma North legislator
said that government tries to enhance and push the agenda of the young people, it’s important to have a legislative agenda for the youth that can enable youth inclusiveness in government programs.
Kintu called upon fellow legislators to push for this agenda and do a background check to make sure that youth are involved in all government programs not only during elections.
The engagement was supposed by Community Integrated Development Initiatives (CIDI) with funding from Caritas Denmark.
Young people in Uganda make over 77% of the total population and continue to grapple with various challenges in their socio economic life such as unemployment, disease vulnerabilities, and inadequate guidance.
The NYAP has often times collaborated with the Uganda Parliamentary Forum on Youth affairs in the pursuit of her advocacy agenda at parliamentary level.
The forum has about 200 Members of Parliament who have signed to passionately steer the youth issues in parliament.
Of these about 50 have already been in parliament before and as such NYAP intends to concentrate on the newly elected 150 MPs so that they all can move at the same wave length but as well NYAP utilize the opportunity to create rapport with the MPs for their day to day engagements.
