 Ya, you're right. My name is Erastas Teria. Thank you for having me. It's a prayer to have you here of course. I want you to introduce yourself because I understand that you're a man who has several hearts. Ya. Basically, I studied engineering in the University of Nairobi. It was environmental and biosystems engineering. And then I had some stint of practice in engineering. And then now I'm working with ICANN, a program that we founded that links young people to opportunities. What you have to do is we prepare these young people and link them up to opportunities. Probably you can make it right because ICANN is an acronym. What does it stand for? ICANN is a long name. It means Inspire Communications and Awareness Network. Yes. Inspire Communications and Awareness Network. The passion came from creation of awareness and of course communicating it to people in an inspirational way. And then we have to network. You see, we can do it by ourselves. So in fact right now we're working with so many networks to see that we are able to get the awareness out there and actually be able to help people. Yes. You're the founder of ICANN. Yes, I am. Colerating with LIP. Ya. What is LIP? LIP is a program from ICANN. LIP essentially means Leadership Experience and Apprenticeship Program. Right. Leadership Experience and Apprenticeship Program. Why leadership? Leadership is because we believe everyone is a leader. So we are developing leadership among young people. This is particularly for young people who are looking out for opportunities in life. So LIP is a dedicated program that develops the leadership abilities required for the opportunities. Because every opportunity requires some leadership capabilities from a young person. Amazing, amazing, amazing. Now to do on our topic we are talking about bridging the opportunity gaps. Ya. What are some of the opportunities that you think are not exploited by young people in the market place? Of course it starts with the thing that we see about 90% of what we are dealing with is young people looking for work. They call it jobs. But of course ourselves we don't call it jobs, we call it opportunities generally. Because the opportunities for work, the opportunities for education, the opportunities for entrepreneurship and a whole portfolio of opportunities that young people could explore. Yes. It's only unfortunate that in our society the only thing young people think about when they are out of school is work. So they can earn money. It's a very limited way of looking at things. When you mentioned money, I'm prompted to ask probably once you finished university did you begin to earn money right away? Not really. Actually when I started visiting the slums and volunteering. And actually going into my pockets to do the fairs to the slums. And visit orphanages, did pro bono projects. And very long internships that were unpaid. And that was a lot of experience to me. And I actually learnt a lot from that and we developed actually our program right now. It came out of all those experiences. Let me ask. You talked about creating programs. An example I want you to like Fuzu. Do you create something like Fuzu? Fuzu I know deals with young people about careers mostly. I see they have a few. I haven't really explored the entire system. But one of the things they do is they aggregate opportunities and send out vacancies. What we might be having slightly different from Fuzu is we do the training for our candidates. We prepare them before we give them the vacancy. One unique thing again we have is we partner with employers. What young people don't understand and I also got surprised when we got started doing this is there are more opportunities than the job seekers. If you talk about employment itself, there are more employment opportunities than the suitable job seekers. When you speak with employers, especially in the private sector, we are working mostly in the private sector. Kebsa, for instance. Employers in the private sector, it could be any business. They tell us that there are things that they would like done, but they don't have the right people for these positions. And when they advertise, everybody applies without even marching their skills and qualities to the position. So it's a case of desperate job seekers flooding your inbox with applications and out of that you may not get the right person. Let me ask you. Do you think universities are not providing the students with enough skills and expertise for the marketplace? That is where actually we identify our problem to be. Our problem to be the institutions, our problem actually begins with families and this is something that people don't really realize. Family is the greatest broken, one of the greatest broken institutions we have in the country because this young person starts their nurturing from family. So when the parent is not aware of how to nurture young person in readiness for opportunities in life, so you see they miss out. And then of course institutions right now which unfortunately seem to be commercial. They really don't care much about the professional qualities that a young person should gain. So long as you can pay the fees, go through some course, you go out. Tamak, if you don't find any job, come back, study another course like that, they don't have career departments which should be a mandatory department in school. When you meet such kind of a student who apparently doesn't have enough skills or here she has been through college, what do you do to them? Now we take them through this leadership experience. One we need to get them and really ascertain that this person knows what they want to do. If they don't we can guide them and then we help them develop the qualities. Employment is not about your skills per se. So your qualifications in school come in most cases, surprisingly, doesn't even count in most cases. So what employers are looking for are certain professional qualities, the content of your character also matters a lot. So they need to see that you're good professionally, your character is right, and then now they can even train you on what you need done in the workplace. So primarily what you do is nurturing people and growing them. Yeah, they have to go through a serious training, have some really tough training in LIF that we make our candidates go through. If a candidate doesn't go through that training sufficiently and impressively, then we can't march to an employer because what we care about in this case is we care about this young person finding the opportunity, whether they are looking for work, we care about them finding it, so we develop them to suitability for their role. But we also care very, very much about the employers that we are serving because we can't give them people who are not qualified. So we do intensive development of the qualities required and then we march them to the suitability. Because of time, let's talk about unemployment among young people. It's at 40% trainer as per its standards. Let me ask what are some of the things that you believe ought to be done or supposed to be continuing the process so as to solve the many unemployment among the youth? Yeah, we need to teach youth that what I see is it all comes down to the person. We need to teach youth to have the right thinking. Actually unemployment is not just about jobs. Unemployment is about you being ready for opportunities. Opportunities gravitate towards a ready person. So young people if they really need to thrive in a market like this is they need to know who they are and it's the awareness that we are driving. Who are you? Are you an engineer or are you somebody in hospital? Yes. And then we are now looking, you now map out your career. When you are smart about who you are, opportunities will come your way. Awesome. There has been really great and unfortunately we are out of time. We look for some time of course to get to bring you along because we believe that information is power. Many thanks for keeping it Y254. It has been such a morning this day. Of course it's quite cold still here in Nairobi but of course we believe that your morning has been lit with our interactions for the day. Keep joining us every Monday to Friday and of course tomorrow it's Wednesday Queens crush. You know we got to do something for tomorrow. We are coming on board. We are going to make your morning lit. Do join us tomorrow. My name is Karanja Alex and many thanks for keeping it Y254.