By Robert Mutasi 
The Tourism Fund has extended its youth empowerment program to Eldoret, training young people in content creation and digital entrepreneurship alongside its hospitality upskilling course.
The training at the Eldoret National Polytechnic is part of the Fund’s countrywide Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) initiative.
According to Tourism Fund officer Sally Rotich, the core RPL program is meant to certify and upskill workers already in the hospitality industry, but a new youth track has been added to respond to opportunities in the digital economy.
“We are currently doing an RPL training at the Eldoret Polytechnic. In addition to upskilling hospitality industry workers, we are also targeting the youth to train them on content creation, basics in photography and storytelling,” she said.
The youth program covers the full content creation process — developing ideas, packaging them into videos, reels, photos and written posts, mastering digital tools, and planning their first short-form content.
It also covers audience growth, content strategy, personal branding and monetization.Rotich said trainees were shown the scale of Kenya’s digital opportunity, with an estimated 57.8 million population, 23.4 million internet users and 18.4 million social media users.
The choice of Eldoret Polytechnic is not exclusive, she said, noting that the training is being rolled out county by county to ensure equitable access.
“This training is happening across different counties to equip the youth with the necessary skills that they need. It’s not exclusive to this institution,” Rotich said.
She said the program is deliberately practical and localized, encouraging participants to use their communities, cultures and local tourism attractions as source material.
“How they can use their local context, their voices to be digital journalists,” she said.
The Tourism Fund is also positioning the youth for employment within the tourism value chain by teaching them how to offer digital services to hotels, restaurants and other tourism businesses.
The Eldoret session brought together a mix of established content creators and beginners, a turnout Rotich termed impressive.
The Tourism Fund, a state corporation mandated to finance tourism development, says it has prioritized capacity building and youth inclusion under the Bottom-Up Economic Transformation Agenda (BETA).
Rotich urged youth in other counties to look out for the next phase.
“Just watch out for the next opportunity, we might be coming to your county in a few months, in a few weeks,” she said.
The program comes at a time when more Kenyan youth are turning to content creation, photography and social media management as viable career paths, moving from being consumers to creators of digital content.