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Out to Lunch

#OutToLunch: Lifetime skills for S6 students on vacation

By Denis Jjuuko If you visit some of the malls in Kampala these days, you would not fail to notice young people milling around the rails, dressed in damaged jeans and taking selfies with their peers. Many are on vacation having completed their advanced level secondary education even though there are many who may not be in this category. Some end up catching a movie or having some chips and chicken served in cardboard boxes. The majority though are just hanging around. For the next eight months or so, such students especially from middle income families will wake up to do nothing for nearly a year as they wait to join university and other such higher institutions of learning. Parents will be happy to let them hang around the city with reckless abandon. Yet this is the time for these young people to acquire some skills, do some work and gain experience or gain some lifetime skills. So what can students on a long senior six school break done during this time? Here are some ideas. Learning to drive Self driving vehicles are many years away even in the developed world. So driving will remain an important lifetime skill for many people. Some jobs such as sales and marketing in big organizations require somebody who knows how to drive. But also it is a job itself for many people. Somebody who knows how to drive has an advantage over someone who doesn’t. It also enables one to be responsible as drivers make decisions every second. If you want your child to improve their decision making capabilities, teach them how to drive. Don’t just teach them how to drive though. Let them learn how to change tyres, washing the vehicle and even changing oil. Cooking and baking There will never be a day when people won’t need food. Most people will always eat cooked food. So instead of the child eating food in cardboard boxes as I mentioned earlier, let them learn how to cook. You can take them to a school that teaches people to cook or bring a teacher at home to teach them. You can pull this together with your friends or relatives in the same neighborhood to reduce the cost. Even if they don’t end up doing this as a business, they will still be able to cook food for themselves and their families. If you teach them baking, they would even start earning income during this period. They can make cookies (or is it daddies?), cakes and such other stuff and sell to their colleagues or shops nearby using the same amount of money as capital that they were spending loitering in Kampala malls. Content creation Creating content is now a source of income for many. Many content creators or social and digital media influencers have no formal qualifications in the work they do. They get a smartphone and generate content. I believe that those who will get trained will become better and earn better. So teach the child photography and videography basics so that they don’t necessarily have to just spend their time taking selfies or photographing the food before they eat it so they can share with their buddies for bragging rights on Gram! Along the way they will become experts and start earning as soon as possible. You can hire a photographer or videographer to teach your children these skills. Even if they don’t become content creators, in whatever career they choose, content creation will be critical as all professions need it to communicate better. There are also some skills offered by companies like Google online such as digital marketing and data analytics that they can enroll for and many are free of charge. Instead of simply watching Netflix, they can spend some of their time getting these skills. Money skills Ugandan schools don’t largely teach people money skills. We learn it when we start earning it and we make many mistakes. So if people learn about money when they are still young, they will make informed decisions later. So the kids taking this long break from academics, can be taught about money by ensuring they manage the budget at home. Send them to markets to buy items and manage the entire process. If they can work somewhere in a place where they have to deal with money, that is even better even if they aren’t paid a lot. Do you have a friend who runs a fuel station, supermarket or restaurant? Those are great training areas on acquiring some money skills but also gaining some work experience especially customer care service and even income if possible however little it can be. The writer is a communication and visibility consultant. djjuuko@gmail.com

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Out to Lunch

#OutToLunch: What are you doing with the space above your house?

By Denis Jjuuko When I left university, my friends and I rented a three-bedroom house somewhere within a walkable distance of the Kampala central business district. Each of us had a bedroom but we shared the living room, kitchen and bathrooms. We equally shared the costs but also avoided stuff we couldn’t individually afford at the time. One TV set was, for example, enough for all of us. One of our cheeky friends named it Ujamaa house—after Julius Nyerere’s socialist model. I was thinking of a better way we can have ‘Ujamaa’ in Uganda today but at an individual level. As individuals, it is easier to do certain things than always waiting for government to organize us. There is increased pressure on land in Kampala and its surrounding areas due to population pressures and the concentration of meaningful economic activity within the radius of about 80km of Kampala. So many people are buying land further away from the city where it (land) is more affordable largely to build residential houses and even commercial structures. The nearer the land to Kampala city, the more expensive it becomes. Many people with land nearer Kampala struggle either to develop it or sell it. This is because, the tradition has been largely to buy land which is either empty without any structures or taking over the land and its structures. But these expensive areas are full of incomplete structures. It is very common to find somebody who built a house or commercial structure and failed to complete it. Others take years to complete which means tying up capital which would have been used in other ventures. Yet we now have the condominium law which allows multiple ownership of structures on the same piece of land. The most common application of the condominium law has been the construction of apartments where units are sold to different people. However, we can flip this even where we don’t have the resources to build structures with multiple floors and many apartments. Imagine if you bought a plot of land today anywhere in metropolitan Kampala or any major town where you live to build a residential house for your family. It may be a bungalow or even a storied house. But the area in which you are building is increasingly becoming expensive. So, what if you designed a house that can allow you to build for yourself but then sell the space above what you don’t need to somebody else? This would require constructing a storied building with the foundation strong enough to enable other people to build on top. This would have to be planned with the architect and the civil and structural engineers. You build the house you need and as the city expands and the area in which you live becomes more valuable, you sell to somebody else to build their house on top. This would be attractive to people who may not want to live far away from the city and don’t necessarily have the resources to buy an empty plot or a house from scratch. Imagine if you owned a building in Ntinda or Muyenga today that you can sell to somebody and still remain a part owner. There are people who live in expensive neighborhoods today yet without much money and at the same time don’t want to sell and relocate to Ziroobwe or Bujjuuko. This model would enable them have money to cater for their other needs or live their dreams without shifting to a ‘poorer’ neighborhood or living far away from the city, in an area that they may considered beneath their status. Many people can end up owning a high-rise building without each spending so much money to acquire land and all that is required. And each of the owners would have their condominium certificate of title. Friends or families can come and do this together. Each floor of the house built increases the value of the property yet lowering the cost of maintaining the building since such costs are shared by the owners or tenants. Owners of incomplete buildings would be able to release their equity from a single building and avoid the wastage of space for storied buildings like it is in Kampala today. Those who may have been struggling to complete their buildings would now be able to do so while spreading their risk. To be honest, this isn’t even such a novel idea. If you usually watch Asian movies, this model of living is common. Many families end up living on a same plot each with their unit within a single big building. Hotel chains do so as well where they sell rooms to different people and charge a management fee. Each time a hotel room or suite is booked, the owner makes money less taxes and service fee. As individuals, we can plan for this and commercialize the space that we aren’t occupying. The writer is a communication and visibility consultant. djjuuko@gmail.com

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