24/09/2025
Nurturing That Bears Seeds: Why Our Priority Should Be Youth Sustainability
How Do We Sustain Our Youth?
- Timely Education: Shake off memorization by rote. Teach skills that reflect the time we live in today, like coding, entrepreneurship, money management, creativity, and critical thinking.
- Access to Funding and Mentorship: Young people with ideas shouldn’t be sidelined or ignored. We must make it possible for them to access grants, soft loans, and networking with experienced mentors to guide their paths.
- Mental Health Support: Too many youths struggle silently with depression, identity crisis, and smothering pressures. A well sustained youth is not just physically healthy but psychologically healthy, too. Promoting mental well-being is no less crucial than schooling or employment.
- Government and Private Sector Partnership: Policies will not do the trick alone. Industry and trade need to open their doors to internships, apprenticeships, and actual jobs. On-the-job exposure transmutes potential into productivity.
- Community Responsibility: Parents, schools, churches, and society must invest in youth not just financially but emotionally. It requires a team effort to raise a generation.
Nurturing our youth means nurturing our future. They are not just "the leaders of tomorrow", they are today's workforce, today's inventors, today's thinkers, and today's doers.
I often think back to that 19-year-old boy. His future doesn't deserve to be defined by, "Anything I can find." If invested in the right way, he could be a million things better than what he is now, which is an added advantage to society.
Youths are like seeds. They can grow to be giant oaks or wither away based on the ground we provide them today. So the real question it's not "Can we afford to keep our young people going?", it should be: "Can we afford not to?"
