A youth led approach to employment creation through multi-level value

chain involvement in the Chicken Business

Organization: Genius Professionals Investment Club (GENPRO)

Contact persons details

Chairman: Mukaya Muhammudu
Treasurer: Twite Daniel
Project Manager: Kalindi Sadat
Secretary: Muwadi Caroline

Introduction

Genius Professionals Investment Club (GENPRO) is an investment club that was founded
in 2014 by fresh graduates in various disciplines with an aim of creating employment for
themselves. Knowing the poor employability of the Uganda economy where 63% of
youths are unemployed whether educated or not, it was a challenge for the founders not
to sit and wait for the jobs that may not take long to come or even never come, we
therefore gathered ourselves (10 people) to start pooling the little we could get and start
some income generating projects. We have so far planted two acres of bananas and the
plantation is performing well with some income already flowing in. This project has had a
significant social impact in the host community because we sell the suckers at a relatively
lower price to the youths who are serious and interested. Despite this success we still face
a challenge of lack of enough land to expand our project. It is upon this that we decided
to try out some other ventures like chicken rearing which do not require a lot of space.
We started with 250 kuroiler birds and they performed well with a net profit of Ugs.
600,000. Given the nature of this business it is most likely to be adopted by many youths
who jobless but have some small spaces to keep some birds. In this proposal we are
therefore seeking support to expand this business so that we also support our fellow
youths to start similar businesses.

Problem Statement

Youth unemployment remains a huge development challenge for most of the developing
countries. In Uganda despite a massive macro-economic development, this has not been
translated into more job creation for the highly young population. Youth unemployment
stands between 64% to70% and about 400,000 youths are released annually into the job
market to compete for approximately 9,000 available jobs (49th State of the Nation
Platform: Youth Unemployment and Job Creation in Uganda: Opportunities and
Challenges, ACODE 2014). It is therefore evident that the rate of job creation falls far
lower than the rate of labor force generation. The Uganda government is however
determined to change the status quo. The Uganda national development plan II (NDPII
2015/16 – 2019/2020) identified agriculture as one of the sectors that have job multiplier
effect and seeks to prioritize among other sectors agriculture. This is in line with the
studies of (Brooks et al., (2012); Kararach et al., (2011)) which assert that countries that
depend heavily on agriculture may not readily create sufficient jobs for the youth in non-
agricultural sectors in the medium term. Despite employing over 64% of Uganda’s
workforce, this sector has been greatly shun by youth who prefer wage jobs as opposed
to dirty and less profitable agriculture. It is not by fate that the youths shun agriculture
but there are many underlying factors; lack of access to startup capital, lack of skills in the
various agricultural businesses, lack of enough land, limited access to market and then
poor attitude preoccupied in them right from school time when farming used to be a
punishment at school.
Our group identified poultry farming as more appealing to youths than crop husbandry as
mentioned in the introduction section. This is not surprising given the fact that most of
the best farmers in the country as recognized by “Vision group”, the nation media group
are significantly from livestock sector. It is upon this that GENPRO is seeking support to
expand its poultry business, establish a model farm and provide enough skills providers
in poultry farming within Kamuli district and beyond. This we believe will accelerate the
growth of our business, create more poultry business entrepreneurs and ultimately
create social development.

Goal
The main goal of this project is to create employment for youths and improve their
standards of living through chicken farming.

Objectives
 To create enough chicken farming skills providers by skilling the members of
Genpro Investment Club in rearing of broiler, layer and kuroiler chicken.
 To create employment for 500 youths within 4 years by interesting youth to
involve themselves in chicken farming by removing bottlenecks like lack of skills
and limited access to chicks and market.
 To establish a learning farm within Kamuli.
justification