The county government of Mombasa is targeting to build capacity of the youth to help them explore the many opportunities existing in the Blue Economy sector.

According to county officials, many of the youth are not aware of the existing opportunities and could not comprehend what the Blue Economy entails and as such fail to exploit it.

Speaking in a Mombasa hotel where the county commemorated the International Youth Day 2021, the chief officer Department of Youth, Gender and Sports Innocent Mugabe said that they were focused on training the youth to take up the opportunities created by the sector as a way of solving the issue of unemployment.

The theme for this year’s celebration was Transforming Food Systems with the county choosing to localise it and focus on the Blue Economy sector.

Mugabe said that the sector contributed a lot on the food value chain especially on the part of fishery and transportation of food through the sea.

He noted that exploitation of the sector was going on at a slow pace thus the need to train more youth to harness the sector.

“We are putting in our focus as a coastal county to make sure that our young people are able to harness the opportunities and this will contribute in a big way towards eliminating issues of poverty and radicalisation of our young people,” said Mugabe.

Mugabe added that there was more to be exploited especially in the fishing industry to ensure that the youth are fully engaged to be able to contribute to the economy.

“We are financing people wanting to do the seafarers course through bursaries and also offer revolving funds for the youth who would want to partake in business to ensure that we be the pioneers in the issues of exploiting the blue economy across the east Africa,” said Mugabe.  

He also said that the county was going to work hand in hand with the national government in their quest to train 1000 youth every year drawn from the six coastal counties on deep sea fishing by helping in training and recruiting.

On August 4th, the Agriculture CS Peter Munya was at the Liwatoni Fishing Complex to officiate the flagging off of twenty youth aboard two vessels FV Seamer II Longliner and FV Miss Jane Longliner who were going to undertake their practical trainings on deep sea fishing.

The training is expected to to ensure that there are adequate skills and experience among the Kenyan youth to be used by the growing fishing industry to exploit the vast fish resources.

“There exists a lot of potential in our marine waters which has now a key focus by the government , it is out of this realisation that the government is making deliberate efforts to explore these resources for socio-economic growth of the coastal communities and nation at large,” said Munya