What Goverment Should Do About Unemployment

 Youth summit aims to tackle unemployment.

A summit on youth employment hosted by the Department For International Development and organized by PDF II in collaboration with The Federal Public Administration Reform Programme was held recently at the Transcorp Hilton, Abuja on the December 3rd with the aim to provide a platform to learn lessons from past job creation schemes and explore new innovative ideas that will help generate employment and raise incomes.

The event was graced by the minister of state for labour, James Ocholli who was representing the vice president, Yemi Osinbanjo.

The summit kicked-off with an ‘ideas market place’ where job creation initiatives were showcased by private sector participants like Leadership, Effectiveness, Accountability & Professionalism (LEAP) as well as a mix of donor and government supported initiatives, where participants were encouraged to shop around and potentially ‘buy’ some ideas. The Minister of State, Ocholli took his time to meet each and every one of these shops before giving his keynote speech in the hall. After which there was a panel discussion featuring representatives from all stakeholders.

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Preceding the minister’s speech, it was established that 2 million Nigerians enter the labour force every year. In his speech, the minister talked about the changes being made in the present government to tackle employment issues including the name change of the Ministry of Labour & Productivity to the now Ministry of Labour & Employment as per the President’s request to better reflect its new goals, among which is youth employment.

It was also established that government alone could not provide all the jobs, hence the need to partner with the private sector. Initiatives such as NAPEP, SURE-P & YouWin were discussed as well as the merits and demerits of each of them.

According to the presentation, National Poverty Eradication Programme which was initiated by the Nigerian Government in 2001 to address poverty in Nigeria was good on paper, but not so much in practice, while You-Win (Youth Enterprise With Innovation In Nigeria) was less grass-root oriented and more urban geared, especially to youths who knew how to write business plans. It was established more importantly that despite their flaws, all future schemes needed to be merit-based as some were plagued with claims of being selective to certain groups or individuals.

A speaker, David McKenzie of The World Bank. spoke about his work on You-Win and the process of evaluating firms to pick. He spoke about why small firms never grow beyond the initial stage and how initiatives like You-Win were helping to change that. The You-Win initiative gave winners N10 million from across all regions of the country and had 24,000 applicants in its first year of launch.

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During the panel discussion which featured LEAP’s C.E.O, Ndidi Nwuneli, as well as its executive director, Iyadunni Olubode, a participant mentioned the broken school system doesn’t empower youths with the right knowledge nor the facilities to move forward after school. Clearly with so much to tackle, the Youth Employment Summit was a step in the right direction.

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