BY MBONO MDLULI
MBABANE – The Youth Enterprise Revolving Fund (YERF) has managed to spend around E27.2 million in helping 1 025 Emaswati youth to start up their businesses.YERF Chief Executive Officer Mandla Nkambule disclosed this on Thursday in Mbabane during a meet-and-greet with the EPN team.
Nkambule explained how the fund had been working in helping Emaswati to start their businesses. Nkambule mentioned that the E27.2 million had been disbursed by the Fund since 2009 when it was established under the Ministry of Sports, Culture and Youth Affairs.
The period between 2009 and around 2015 and 2016, according to Nkambule, was the first phase of the rollout of the Fund. During this period, the Fund disbursed E10 million to help 700 Emaswati. Nkambule said the first phase of the disbursement of the business startups from YERF had to stop around 2015 and 2016 in order for the Fund to be revived, so that more youth in Eswatini could benefit. According to the CEO, the Fund was all about including as many youthful Emaswati as it could, hence it was revived in 2018.
Speaking about the second phase, Nkambule said the Fund disbursed about E17.2 million in helping around 325 Emaswati.
The CEO disclosed that currently, there were about 120 applications from the youth who wanted to start businesses and they projected to have spent around E6 million by the end of this year. Nkambule noted that the asset portfolio of the Fund would be around E25 million, since the start of the second phase up until now. He said as workers of the Fund, they believed that business was the initiative that was necessary to improve the economy of any country, hence they wanted the youth to get in full time in business.
He said it was important that the Fund should start by running some awareness campaigns among the youth in the country so that they could decide if they wanted to be in business or not. Nkambule praised His Majesty King Mswati III for giving Royal assent to the Citizen Economic Empowerment Act. He described this piece of legislation as an initiative that was going to give the youth an opportunity to improve their businesses.
Nkambule said this legislation was to identify certain businesses so that they could be reserved for Emaswati. He clarified that such was not meant to say foreign business people were not doing business in the right way but was meant to give a chance to Emaswati to make money in business. The CEO further thanked Parliament for having enacted this Act to give a chance to Emaswati to improve their business skills. Nkambule also noted that the youth in the country lived in different areas, which presented many different advantages and disadvantages, for example, the youth in the countryside had and, yet the youth in urban areas did not have such an advantage.
He said the Fund would go around the country, empowering the youth on how they were supposed to
make the most of the advantages they had in their different areas
