By Naomi Sharang
Records obtained from the National Bureau of Statistics indicate that Nigeria’s employment crisis worsened in the first quarter of 2016 with unemployment rate rising to 12.1 per cent.
The bureau, in its “Unemployment Watch Report’’, noted that between December 2015 and March 2016, the population of unemployed Nigerians increased by 518,000 to more than 1.45 million.
According to the report, failure of government to meet its target of creating a minimum of 1.5 million jobs required for the period worsens the unemployment situation.
“The number of Nigerians in the economically active population who chose not to actively look for work, declined from 28.06 million in December 2015 to 27.5 million by end of March, 2016,’’ the report indicates.
In the light of this, analysts observe that Nigeria has a growing population of people starting up their own businesses as opposed to waiting to get employed, noting that starting up businesses then requires skills and resources.
Worried by the development, the Federal Government recently inaugurated the N10 billion Youths Entrepreneurship Support (YES) programme geared towards empowering youth with loans to start businesses.
Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment Okechukwu Enelamah, said the ministry would partner all agencies of government to create new jobs.
According to him, 40 per cent of Nigerian graduates have no jobs and that an average of eight million Nigerians enters the job market annually.
The minister said that the project was an initiative of the Bank of Industry (BoI) as part of Federal Government’s youth employment scheme, saying that about 36,000 jobs would be created annually through it.
The Managing Director of BoI, Mr Waheed Olagunju, said the programme would help in developing the capacity of Nigerian youths.
“It is aimed at equipping them to be self-employed by starting and managing their own businesses as well as eventually becoming employers of labour.
“Such small businesses, or micro small and medium enterprises, are indeed the bedrock of any economy, including that of our dear country Nigeria.
“This time, BoI’s approach to tackling the youth capacity building challenge and unemployment is to focus on young aspiring entrepreneurs between the age bracket of 18 years and 35 years who have potentially viable business ideas.
“This is by developing the YES programme as a platform for youths to be trained and granted access to finance for actualising their potentially viable business plans,’’ he said.
Olagunju noted that it was widely acknowledged that unemployment among Nigerian youths was high and growing at an alarming rate.
“Youth unemployment in Nigeria is estimated at over 50 per cent. This poses a great moral and social burden on the society because the youths have limited or no channel to productively deploy their intelligence, vibrancy and energy,’’ he said.
He said a 2013 survey by the Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research indicated that capacity building programmes aimed at addressing youth unemployment had not achieved targets.
“They have concentrated more on training without any tie-in to the provision of suitable finance from relevant segments of the financing value chain which is a critical success factor in the establishment of small businesses.
“The capacity building programmes also hardly take care of the entire training value chain as well, in terms of entrepreneurship, business management and technical skills,’’ Olagunju said.
He, nonetheless, said that BoI had introduced a merit-based N2 billion financial inclusion scheme for youths known as the Graduate Entrepreneurship Fund (GEF) and which could be described as the precursor to YES.
“It was inaugurated by the bank in October 2015 in partnership with the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) Directorate.
“The GEF programme is an innovative approach aimed at tackling the social malaise of graduate unemployment that has engulfed the country.
“The strategy is to identify the innate talents of the young graduates as soon as they leave school, build their capacities for self-reliance; and also empower them to establish their own businesses.
“Thereby, they will be creating jobs not just for themselves, but also for other youths that they may employ and the indirect jobs that would also be created as a result of ventures promoted under GEF.
“It entailed an online business ideas competition in which 3,100 serving members of the NYSC made their submissions out of which 1,000 top scorers emerged.
“These successful candidates underwent entrepreneurship capacity building programmes in seven locations in the six geo-political zones of the country, including the special centre in Lagos, to facilitate access to finance for their business plans,’’ Olagunju said.
Similarly, the acting Director-General, Industrial Training Fund (ITF), Mr Dickson Onuoha, reiterated the commitment of the fund to key into the economic diversification policy of the Federal Government.
He said that no meaningful growth in the economy could take place without availability of skilled manpower.
Onuoha posited that the ITF, saddled with the responsibility of training young entrepreneurs, would position youths with skills capable of making positive impact on the economy.
He said that the current focus of the ITF on training for job creation was to assist the ongoing effort to curb insecurity and reduce unemployment across the country.
“The fund has begun the entrepreneurial training of 9,500 unemployed youths in 18 states in the fifth phase of the National Industrial Skills Development Programme.
“The states include, Abia, Anambra, Adamawa, Borno, Plateau, Delta, Sokoto State, Kwara, Ogun, Katsina State, Cross River, Lagos State and Kaduna State,’’ he said.
Onuoha said that the training, expected to last for three months, was designed to equip the youth with employability skills.
“This training programme is designed to equip young Nigerians with requisite skills for employment and job creation.
“It is specially packaged to fast-track the realisation of the Nigerian Industrial Revolution Plan,’’ he said.
However, Mr Bright Jaja, an entrepreneur, advised youths in the country to enrol in skill acquisition programmes to avoid being unemployed even after graduation.
Jaja, the founder of iCreate Africa, a non-governmental organisation, said that skill acquisition was the panacea for addressing the country’s unemployment challenges.
“We are trying to see how we can make the next generation better by helping them to acquire skills and developing them to make the world a better place,’’ he noted.(NANFeatures)