Skills Landscape and Self-sustenance of Youth-led Business Establishments in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Abstract

Youth Unemployment has become the biggest development challenge in Tanzania. Young people have few opportunities to learn skills to help them start and sustain their established micro and small enterprises and therefore, the majority of youth-owned enterprises do not survive beyond one year. This research aimed at assessing the youth skills landscape and their role in enhancing the self-sustainability of youth-led business establishments in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Specifically, the study intended to evaluate the skills profile of youths in their business establishments, to evaluate the modes of acquisition of skills by youths as well as to assess how skill landscape influences business self-sustainability. An enterprise survey was conducted where 274 micro and small scale enterprises were randomly selected and interviewed for the study. The business sustainability was measured using the working capital turnover which was then clustered to get the business sustainability status. The logistic model was used in determining the influence of skills to the micro and small scale business sustainability. The findings reveal that communication skills, business plan skills, attending the professional training, and gender of the business owner had a significant effect on business sustainability. The findings show that most of the skills are informally acquired from either internships or volunteering while few got the business skills from formal vocational training (VETA). The study recommends that youth should be encouraged to join the formal training for business skills acquisitions in order to be equipped with the proper business skills for their business sustenance. On top of that, the government should improve the technical and vocational training centers at a district level to accommodate youth who need to acquire tailor-made vocational training skills

Key Words: skills landscape, youth, business sustainability