Youth Economic Empowerment and Sustainable Development Goal on Decent Work: A Case of Kenya Commercial Bank 2jiajiri Program

Authoritarian developmentalism has been the justification for making the government assumes the role of primary agent in promoting development through youth economic empowerment. The taxpayer funded programmes which were launched after the promulgation of the National Youth Policy (NYP) have failed because of corruption and overall mismanagement. The net result of this top to bottom approach has been the high unemployment and under-employment of Kenyan youth. On the other hand, KCB’s 2jiajiri program, with its bottom up approach has been successful in economically empowering youths by training them to be entrepreneurs by giving them vocational skills to secure decent work. Therefore , Kenya needs to change tact by adopting the democratic developmentalist view of youth economic empowerment which allows the private sector to step in and assist the state to meet its obligations under the eighth Sustainable Development Goal (SDG).This would necessarily mean abolishing the all tax payer funded youth economic empowerment initiatives in favour of the state to put in place incentives for big business to use Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as a vehicle for partnering with the state in meeting the obligations created by the SDG framework. The study data was collected and coded appropriately and analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Scientists (SPSS version 25). The results were presented in tables using descriptive statistics (frequency counts and cross tabulations). Inferential statistics was used to measure the degree of association of the KCB Bank 2jiajiri program on youth economic empowerment and decent work of the graduates. The study found out that improvement of livelihood on beneficiaries was observed in some aspect. Increased income and access to decent work had a positive response from the beneficiaries. Access to basic needs had mixed responses while improved job creation was positively indicated by the respondents. The study also found that cost of course was not fair, the course content in a big way related well with existing job or skills. Cash advancement on the beneficiary received mixed responses from the respondents. Observation on reasonability of lending terms received a fairly negative response just as it was the case with amount of loan awarded. The study recommends that the government should let the private sector play a leading role in micro-financing poor youth self-employment as a form of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) .This is because of the systematic failures of past government micro-financing initiatives and the success of the KCB 2Jiajiri program.