To succeed in doing business in the hostel you need to be connected to the student leadership. Once they get the go ahead to operate the shop, the prospector usually has a way of finding start-up money. Students who run such side hustles are awash with money.

Alternative businesses include cooking and selling foods which comprise Ugali, SukumaWiki, also sell avocado. Some students will also bring maize flour from home in a bid to cut costs and survive the long campus weeks. Some businesses initiated in the campuses later flourish and relocated to site outside the campuses. One of the successful colleges in Nairobi started at the University of Nairobi dorm rooms and it is now almost becoming a University.

One or two students take business in the hostels rooms to extremes. Our informer who did not want to be identified told us that rooms are used for recording phonographic films. Some of the CDs sold in streets are recorded in some university hostels! Unconfirmed reports suggest that students are involved in drugs inside and outside university hostels. Drug barons invite students, mostly good-looking female students, to functions outside the universities where are they hired to traffic drugs. They cash retainer of ksh25, 000. Once in it, students find it almost impossible to get out of it. Students who renegade end up loosing their lives.

Parents should take a little more interest on what their children are doing at the university, specifically, in hostel rooms. The revelations could be shocking. They wield a lot of (still Influence college children’s behaviour when they are in the college of involvement with drugs, alcohol and risky sexual activity even after their child leaves for college). Recent studies in the US shows that parents’ knowledge or awareness of what their children are doing at college is associated with their child’s less risky behaviour. Students who say their fathers were in the know had a lower likelihood of abusing drugs or engaging in risky sexual behaviours. When mothers were in the know, students were less likely to drink alcohol. The protective effect of mothers’ awareness was more pronounced when the students also felt close to their (mom). Under those circumstances, the researchers found that students were less likely to be involved in any of the three risk behaviour, viz., drugs, alcohol and risky sexual activity.

“For parents, the fact that closeness plays a strong role is a message not to be overbearing,” Walker said. “Having a close relationship promotes the child wanting to open up and share what’s going on rather than the parent having to intrusively solicit the information from the child.”

Walker and her colleagues agree that delaying adulthood results in an extension of parents’ period of service to their children. The study’s findings show that the relationships between parents and children continue to be important during the transition to adulthood.