18 Sep 2019

North West District councillors have urged the district leadership to come up with interventions to address challenges faced by Youth Development Fund (YDF) beneficiaries to ensure the sustainability of their projects.

Speaking during a full council session on Tuesday, some councillors said some beneficiaries were failing to service their loans as their profits were channeled towards high rentals and other essentials such as electricity and water bills.

The councillors were responding to the chairperson’s speech, Mr Duncan Enga, who said the programme continued to experience challenges such as non-payment of YDF loans by beneficiaries, folding of projects due to high rentals and lack of operational space. 

The council chairperson said YDF loan repayment still posed a lot of challenges since most of the youth were not in compliance to their loan repayment obligations.

He noted that over P18 million was owed by youth companies in the district, adding that only P728 000 had been recovered since 2009. 

He requested councillors to encourage the youth to service their YDF loans. 

Shortage of serviced land for youth enterprises, lack of monitoring of projects due to shortage of staff and lack of commitment by beneficiaries are some of the challenges faced by youth owned projects. 

The councillor for Boro/Sennonori, Mr Kenson Kgage appealed to the district leadership to come up with intervention strategies to assist beneficiaries.

He said the council had many unutilised open spaces around Maun, and suggested that they could consider assisting young people with land to operate from, adding that they could put porta cabins.

Mr Kgage advised council officers to benchmark from the Chobe District, saying providing porta cabins to young people was working wonders.

He said government encouraged young people to utilise available programmes, but that it was unfortunate as they were not allocated land to start the projects.

Specially elected councillor, Mr Abel Molelo concurred that most of the beneficiaries were running businesses at a loss hence their failure to service the loans.

He said some were paying rental of over P3 000 yet they were not making sufficient profits.  

He said challenges faced by beneficiaries needed the leadership to up its game and see how best they could assist them. Councillors were also informed that the Ministry of Youth Empowerment, Sport and Culture Development (MYSC) was undertaking an exercise to review the programme with final pronouncements expected to be made before the end of the current financial year.

The outcome of the review, he said, was expected to come up with improvements that would address challenges experienced by the youth. 

They were also informed that the ministry was working on a sustainable loan repayment strategy geared towards improving collection from youth businesses. 

To address the issue of lack of operational space, Mr Enga revealed that the ministry was also working with land boards to secure land for youth enterprises, and that the MYSC youth land banks occupancy guidelines had been finalised and rolled out to districts.

Despite the challenges, Mr Enga pointed out that for the past five years the district had seen a significant growth in YDF programme uptake due to extensive outreach programmes that were carried out.

“You will note that unlike in the past where uptake was very low, we now experience up to 100 per cent utilisation of funds in the district,” he stressed. 

Other notable improvements mentioned was the district being able to address all training backlog, hence all YDF beneficiaries had been exposed to basic entrepreneurship training and records keeping.

 The district also managed to embark on an extensive outreach exercise to take services to the youth across the district, including Rural Area Dwellers (RADS) settlements. ends