Mutharika courts New York business tycoon
President Peter Mutharika on Wednesday met New York business tycoon Thomas Barry, who is president and chief executive officer for Zephyr Management, to discuss business opportunities the company may bring to Malawi.
Zephyr Management is a global emerging markets manager, specialising in the creation and management of highly focused private equity funds.
In an interview after the meeting, Barry said among others, he is interested to bring entrepreneurial training to Malawi to empower youths to start their own businesses.
He commended Mutharika for initiating community technical colleges and pledged his support towards the initiative.
“We discussed community technical colleges, job creation opportunities when one finishes technical colleges,” said Barry, adding that one of the innovative ideas to empower the youth is to give them entrepreneurial training and small businesses.
He said it is important to promote community technical colleges to enable the youth start own businesses because most manufacturing and other companies employ graduates from other colleges and not technical colleges.
“So, we shall bring entrepreneurial training to Malawi,” said Barry.
Government has so far constructed 28 community technical colleges. Government has also pledged to construct a community technical college in each constituency.
“Madam Speaker, through the 28 community technical colleges we have established, we are training our youths in vocational skills. We want our youths to employ themselves and create jobs for others. I want our youths to drive our industrialisation programme,” said Mutharika in his State of the National Address for the 2019/2020 financial year.
He said he is committed to promoting high quality, skilled and productive youths for them to participate in the sustainable economic growth.
“In order to respond to high unemployment among the youth, my Government adopted the first- ever Graduate Youth Internship Programme. We deployed over 4000 graduate interns to various public institutions for them to gain work experience. Let me repeat what I have said before, we will offer jobs to all the youth under this internship programme,” he said.
