The ministry of education needs to close the academic gaps that exist in the technical and vocational education and Training (TVET) schools and the current generation to ensure the growth of the country’s sectors.

There is a need to encourage TVET schools in the country because integrating digital skills and ICT into education reduces the need to hire foreign experts. Our education system must focus on improving the teaching of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) at secondary schools and, if possible, science subjects must be made compulsory up to senior three.

Teaching STEM will activate a technique that enables students to carry out research and make discoveries that are more reliable and innovative than being dependent on white-collar jobs, which are not enough to take all the skilled labour.

The poor system of education we have in the country, coupled with the lack of diverse courses at universities, has made the majority of young people pursue only courses such as journalism, business, and law. Most people have been made to believe that some courses have a pathway to joblessness, so they do not go for them.

Sometimes in a family, you find all members have studied the same course, which makes them irrelevant to the market for employment.

Most countries today have embarked on the teaching of STEM and want to make their generation relevant to the world’s advancement in technologies. Courses in the arts and humanities are no longer useful in the current situation, where innovation and digital skills are in high demand to combat the unemployment rate among young people.

The government, through the ministry of education, should ensure that teaching and STEM and TVET schools are empowered throughout the country to fight the high unemployment rate among young people.

Last year, we all witnessed several attacks on aid workers by enraged unemployed youth who claimed that NGOs and UN agencies had violated the national employment rate of 80%.

These youth could not have turned their anger to the NGOs if they had studied courses that made them self-reliant. There are courses in agriculture, plumbing, electricals, masonry, welding, fabrication, carpentry, and ICT that can make one self-independent.

The country has a lot of courses that only demand manpower to exploit. South Sudan could not be hiring Sudanese experts to operate its oil fields after independence if we had petroleum experts. The few South Sudanese graduates from Malaysia are not enough to manage the entire oil fields in the country.

Also, there is a need for the government to improve security in the states. There are a lot of investment opportunities outside the capital of Juba that can act as employment avenues for young people. If there was stability in the country, young people would not be scrambling for the few NGOs in Juba. But as it is now, when they are employed and assigned to the states, they are attacked by the village youth.

The protracted insecurity in most parts of the country has caused the high influx of people in Juba seeking safety and better services. This has also caused more rampant land grabbing on the outskirts of Juba than in any other town across the country, simply because of the high population in Juba.

Every citizen wants to come to Juba to look for employment opportunities either from companies or NGOs. Security and a better education system are the two key things the government needs to find as the key to fighting the unemployment rate among young people.