THE Parliamentary Standing Committee for Social Welfare and Development has rooted for the scaling up a greenhouse projects to address unemployment among the youth.
Through its chairperson, Ms Fatma Hassan Toufiq, the team argued that such projects have a potential of changing youth’s mindset, communities and graduates towards enterprise development for self-employment, agribusiness development, job creation, community development and economic prosperity.
Ms Toufiq, whose team visited a greenhouse project implemented adjacent to Meru District Commissioner’s office here on Saturday, emphasized the importance of sustaining such initiatives.
“This can be made possible if all districts allocate ample spaces for running the lucrative projects,” she said.
In his quick rejoinder, Deputy Minister of State in the Prime Minister’s Office responsible for Labour, Youth, Employment and People with Disabilities, Mr Patrobas Katambi said the government had rolled out the Building a Better Tomorrow Youth Initiative for Agribusiness Programme (BBT-YIA), with the sole aim of increasing employment for young people to three million and increase the growth of the agricultural sector to reach 10 per cent by 2030 (Agenda 10/30).
According to the Deputy Minister, the initiative will be implemented throughout the country where all qualified young people will have the opportunity to do agriculture business in the value chain.
For his part, Ayubu Wilfred from Fair Agri appealed to the government’s support in helping youths realise their dreams.
He equally, singled out shortage of space as one of the reasons affecting the prosperity of greenhouse projects among the youth.
“We haven’t managed to meet the demands of clientele due to limited space for constructing these houses,” said Mr Wilfred whose group specialises in cultivation and sell of vegetables.
Greenhouse farming is a broad term that involves various types of sheltered structures.
