In an event for the opening of the Cianda Assistant County Commissioner’s office, a young woman broke protocol to give her academic papers to Interior Cabinet Secretary Kithure Kindiki in a bid for a job opportunity.
Unemployment of well-educated Kenyans is not uncommon, with 4000 trained medical doctors in Kenya unable to get a job, despite hospitals being overwhelmed by thousands of patients daily.
With data from the World Bank indicating that 12% of Kenya’s labour force with advanced education was unemployed in 2019, we can find a possible solution for this in an unlikely place, the vibrant academic ghostwriting sector in Kenya.
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This was more than the average wage and much more than what he earned as a teacher and despite the fact that the ethical issues with this practice are clear, something that Kennedy himself admits, there is an underlying lesson to be learned: that skilled labour in Kenya is exportable, and can be a solution to the unemployment that affects members of the Kenyan labour force with advanced education.
While China’s economic growth has been greatly contributed to by the “exportation” of manufacturing labour by having foreign companies manufacture in China, there is plenty to be learned about this model from a Kenyan perspective.
Just like Rome copied and adapted things from other empires, Kenya must steal from the Chinese model through the formalization and encouragement of the exportation of skilled labour, through legitimate means, and with a firm legal framework that protects workers.
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The success of Kenyans abroad highlighted in Chams Media Ltd’s series Daring Abroad, and the status of Kenya as a hub for highly qualified academic writers, there is evidence that Kenyans with advanced education have skills and abilities that are competitive on a global level.
Additionally, a large amount of diaspora remittances in Kenya (USD 4.0 mn in 2022) is a large source of foreign currency. Formalizing these payments would make them less variable and shift them from being acts of goodwill by Kenyans abroad to a legitimate source of foreign currency and make labour a proper export, rather than the current informal state of diaspora remittances.
Considering the normalcy of access to the Internet in Kenya’s largest cities like Nairobi, and the emergence of remote work as a popular option for employers and employees, a case can be made that a leaf should be borrowed from the ghostwriting sector and that just as companies from all over the world go to China for their manufacturing needs, Kenya can dominate the global labour market with skilled, well-educated labour.
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