Marathoner Macharia extends youth empowerment project at Kenswed

Three-time Nagano Marathon champion Isaac Macharia believes the opening of a vocational training centre at Kenswed is an important step in his quest to empower the youth towards self-employment.

Over the weekend, Macharia and his development partners launched the vocational training centre and a dental clinic at Kenswed Organisation in Ngong, Kajiado County.

Kenswed is a brain child of the 2:07 marathoner, started 10 years ago.

“Now that we have a secondary school, a hospital and a vocational training centre, our next focus is empowering the youth through a ‘seed fund’. This will help those who are into entrepreneurship start their own small and micro enterprises. That is the motivation we have even as we seek for more partners to help roll out the programme,” said Macharia.

“We want to empower the youth with skills and help them start up small businesses and cottage industries at their homes with the experience they are getting from Kenswed vocational training centre. That’s my goal for the near future.”

Macharia said the Covid-19 pandemic taught him and the world crucial lessons on sustainability and his quest to empower the youth is driven by the challenges experienced during the lockdowns.

Swedish pop star Måns Zelmerlöw, a founding member of ZBF Foundation — one of the Kenswed partners — added that music and sports will also be crucial in advancing this next step.

“We want music to be a big part of Kenswed as well,” said Zelmerlöw. “We have a music studio at the vocational training centre and I am hoping to make it even better so that more students can get into music, learn to play instruments. In addition my colleague at ZBF (Jonas Björkman) and I want music and sports to be a big part of Kenswed. That’s why we created a multi-sports facility at the middle of Kenswed.”

Programme manager at ZBF, Kasper Skarrie said there is need to equip local youth with simple skills that will help them find solutions to their everyday challenges and eventually have a livelihood they can be proud of.

“We need to give them simple skills from the secondary school, to the vocational training centre and to self-employment,” said Kasper.

Upon the launch of a dental clinic, Damaris Odulwa, a community oral health officer at Kenswed, said the unit was established upon the realisation, following a short-time research, that there was huge need for both the students at the institution and the community.

“Our focus is more on preventive dentistry and that is why we have started giving oral health education to school going children in primary schools, both private and public, around this area,” said Adulwa.