Ministry for cooperatives among skilled youths

Ministry of Trade and Industry has commended COMSIP for mobilizing Youth Skills Challenge Support beneficiaries into cooperatives saying this will ensure that they effectively benefit from the program and sustain their trades.

The ministry’s small and medium enterprises and cooperatives principal secretary Francis Zhuwao was speaking in Dowa District during a meeting with 70 youths trained in various vocational skills under the Program.

Zhuwao said cooperatives should be embraced because they help people to be in charge of their income generating activities.

He said: “They should not operate in isolation. Cooperatives are good models of doing businesses with advantages such as predictable financing, bargaining power on prices, available markets that need huge volumes, have access to loans and value addition on goods for big profits.”

He said the initiative will make the skilled youths to effectively contribute to the industrialization pillar of the Malawi Vision 2063.

COMSIP Cooperative Union Limited chief executive officer Tenneson Gondwe said cooperatives empower people to sustain livelihoods.

“We have equipped them with best ways to run their cooperatives that will strengthen their transformation process of eliminating poverty in their households. We gave them the start-up tools, and now 15 of the 31 cooperatives have accessed loans of over 17 Million from our financial subsidiary, COMSIV Limited for the establishment of their businesses. This is the progress cooperatives can achieve,” he said.

The sentiments from the two resonate with remarks made by the Director of Social Protectionand poverty reduction in the ministry of Finance and economic Affairs Kate Langwe, who after touring Youth Skills beneficiaries in the southern region echoed the need to mobilise them into cooperatives for better results.

In the first cohort of YSCS 673 youths qualified for startup tools and are already plying their trades, which have been boosted by the startup loans that they are getting from COMSIV Limited.