Work, Study & Life After School

Kenyan youth unemployment is covered constantly — the percentages, the policy arguments, the employer commentary about graduates who are not job-ready. It is covered as an economic story.

It is almost never covered as a parenting story, which is strange, because that is where it is actually lived. A degree was paid for, sometimes at real cost. A child came home. Months passed. Everyone is being careful with each other in a way that is its own kind of exhausting.

This pillar is the sequel to University Readiness. The same parent who prepared a teenager for campus meets these questions three or four years later, and there is almost nothing written for them from a place of faith rather than economics.

So: what do you say to a young adult who is losing confidence? How do you keep a house workable when someone has moved back into it as an adult? How do you talk honestly about whether a degree is still the right route without dismissing the one your child already has — or shaming the one who chose TVET instead?

Underneath it is a question about identity. A young person who has absorbed the idea that they are their job is in trouble either way. Teaching a teenager to work before they need a salary is character formation, and it starts long before graduation.