Curbing retirees’ brain wastage

It is not an accident that apart from those directly affiliated with it in one way or another, very few have heard of the Association of Former International Civil Servants in Kenya (AFICS-Kenya), which is itself a member of the worldwide Federation of Associations of Former International Civil Servants (FAFICS) of the United Nations.

Individually or collectively, retirees from corporate and public institutions tend to quickly fade from the public eye because, unfortunately, in these shores, relevance seems to equate to incumbency. It often does not matter how long one has served or at what level of seniority. Out of office, out of equation.

But it should not be this way as the AFICS-Kenya is demonstrating. As current chairman John Kakonge says, although the organisation was inspired by the desire to help members primarily take care of welfare issues after leaving their cushy jobs at the UN, they realised that it could be a lot more than that because of the very rich pool of diverse knowledge, skills and experience residing in its membership. This is what inspired the AFICS-Kenya Consultancy services.

Collective expertise

Essentially, the collective expertise and knowledge within AFICS-Kenya Consultancy is available to governments, county governments, corporate and non-governmental institutions to tap into to generate and or/apply all sorts of insights.

As Ambassador Kakonge says: “We are committed to our clients and (to) delivering great outcomes for them. We aim to be recognised as a leader, a trusted partner and adviser in our areas of expertise and competency.

One of our advantages is that we are a multidisciplinary service, meaning that we are able to enhance performance, refine skills and streamline processes through interaction among our team members with their combined expertise, thus ensuring not only a more efficient service but also a higher quality of advice and support.”

The AFICS-Kenya Consultancy is broad-based, independent and impartial and works with clients to enhance their capacities and capabilities in the delivery of their products and services, he says.

Their expertise and experience covers capacity development and training, conferencing and events management, corporate governance, education and youth empowerment, environmental management and policy, finance management, gender issues, health, human resource management, humanitarian crises and disaster management, monitoring and evaluation, policy and research, population and statistics, resource mobilisation and security and investigations.

This list spans almost all the issues that are of urgent concern to administrations at all levels. Not surprisingly, they reflect all the areas that the UN is concerned about at the global level and which have been distilled into the Sustainable Development Goals that UN countries have committed to achieve.

The list also resonates with most of the issues that are now at the top of many corporate priorities – gender, health, humanitarian crises and disaster management as well as youth empowerment. Concern around monitoring and evaluation remains a top priority particularly in public finance because of the profligate manner in which public resources are used.

I was impressed by the AFICS-Kenya initiative because as I said earlier, the issue of brain wastage due to retirement is a real one in many countries.

Many African countries decree that people retire at 55 or 60, which, as has been established by many human productivity studies, is an aberration of sorts. That is the age when most people are at their optimal best in terms of understanding the subject matter and applying the experience that comes with application. It certainly is a strange time to expect them to step aside.

Developed countries do not retire at this age as most people can and do work well into their seventies. This reduces dependency, extends the utility value of highly experienced and skilled people and works well to ensure skills transfer to younger people, or relearning among the older folks.

Building synergies

An initiative like AFICS-Kenya and the consultancy arm that is intended to continue creating value for those that have retired is a progressive one that that can be copied by other retirees finding themselves in similar circumstances. It demonstrates that while there is scope to continue working in individual consultancies, there may be more opportunities in building synergies.

AFICS-Kenya is also an initiative that leaders seeking to support innovative ideas could embrace by extending deliberate support to them as is extended to other groups of people. The key advantage with this one is that the governments will be paying for services it needs and for which it is now paying top dollar to foreign entities, which often use these locally available high quality human resources. Why not support them directly?

The writer, a former Editor-in-Chief of Nation Media Group, is now consulting. [email protected]; @TMshindi