Let’s be honest about the multi-year investment we call higher education: it’s starting to look like a broken promise.
Every year, thousands of our children put on their gowns, walk across university stages, and smile for photos holding a piece of paper that families sacrificed everything for.
Parents empty their life savings, and students pull breathless all-nighters, all for a credential that is supposed to guarantee financial security.
Instead, a heart-breaking number of these young people step directly off the stage and straight into an economic brick wall.
Behind the numbers are real, human faces.
When we look at global stats showing a youth unemployment rate of 12.4 percent—leaving roughly 67 million young people jobless worldwide—it feels distant.
But closer to home, the crisis walks our streets.
The Namibia Statistics Agency places general unemployment at a staggering 36.9 percent, while active youth unemployment hovers around 44.4 percent.
If you count the discouraged young people who have completely given up the job hunt out of sheer exhaustion, that number rockets past 61 percent.
We are looking at an entire generation of bright, capable minds sitting idle at home, their dreams deferred, and their dignity strained as they depend on struggling parents just to buy basic necessities.
We can’t keep blaming a slow economy or a bad corporate hiring season.
The truth is much more uncomfortable: our higher education pipeline is built for an industrial age that has long left the building.
We teach our kids to memorize theories, pass exams, and patiently wait for an HR manager to give them a chance.
But companies are shrinking, entry-level admin roles are being swallowed by artificial intelligence, and the traditional corporate slots simply aren’t there anymore.
It breaks a parent’s heart to watch a child graduate with honours, only to spend their days sending out hundreds of unanswered CVs.
If we want to slow down this burning crisis, we have to flip the script entirely. Universities need to stop training students exclusively to be job seekers.
It’s time to teach them how to be job creators.
Imagine if business creation wasn’t just a niche elective reserved for commerce majors.
What if entrepreneurship was deeply embedded into every single syllabus on campus?
An accounting major shouldn’t just know how to audit an existing multi-national; they should learn how to scale a fresh financial consultancy.
A computer science student shouldn’t just learn to code for an existing firm; they need to know how to build, protect, and monetize their own applications.
An agriculture student shouldn’t just learn how to manage fields—they should be taught to launch Aristech start-ups that fix local supply chain blockages.
This isn’t about telling every graduate to open a small retail shop or trade basic goods.
It’s about teaching them to use their specific academic expertise to solve real, grinding industrial bottlenecks.
Industries are desperate for smart solutions to inefficient logistics, broken waste management, and outdated local manufacturing.
Who better to fix these is- sues than specialized graduates who just spent four years studying them?
If a student spends their final year building a viable business model to solve a real industry pain point, they don’t graduate into a job hunt.
They graduate into a business they already run.
This kind of shift requires universities to shred their out-dated, theory-heavy curricula in favour of practical, project-based learning.
It means the private sector needs to stop hoarding mentorship, an the government needs to step up with accessible seed fund- ing and hassle-free business registration for 22-year-olds.
We have the most educated, tech-savvy generation in history sitting idle, and it is an absolute waste of human potential.
There is hope. This hope is anchored directly in Namibia’s Sixth National Development Plan (NDP6), launched by President Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah as the definitive “final push” toward achieving Vision 2030.
Built on critical pillars of human development and economic transformation, NDP6 shifts national policy focus toward youth empowerment, skills development, and structural innovation.
It serves as a collective rallying call and a strategic blueprint to deliberately turn structural challenges into economic building blocks.
If we change the way we teach and align campus culture with this national framework, we can turn our universities from factories of frustration into incubators of new industries.
The corporate jobs aren’t coming back to save us. It’s time to give our graduates the tools to build their own doors.
This views and opinions are not necessarily of my employer but of my very own.
Kevin Rukoro a youth activist, public servant, media student and founder of the Anointed Levites Foundation
