Joel Ajayi

The Minister of Youth Development, Comrade Ayodele Olawande, has urged various stakeholders in Youth development to complement their positive engagements to create meaningful environment so that young people of this country can thrive.

The Minister made this appeal when he received the team of World bank officials led by their team leader Masheshwor Shrestha, World bank economist in his office in Abuja.

In the words of the Minister: “when you are engaged positively, you have a feeling that the government exists and what the president is doing. We can complement this to create a meaningful environment so that young people of this country can thrive”.

According to the Honourable Minister, since the inception in 2007, the Ministry has been saddled with the development of more than half of Nigeria’s population.He explained that the current reality shows that 60 million youths are in the labour market and additional 5.5 million youths join the labour market every year and almost 58 percent of informal workforce are young people while the majority of these informal youths are found in rural areas and semi-urban areas being vulnerable and at risk. These data, he opined, will go a long way in the development of Nigeria if harnessed effectively.

Olawande expressed his dissatisfaction in the deficiency of skills for job market, relevant vocational training, lack of access to capital and funds safety, infrastructural deficit.He thereby implored various stakeholders to build on the existing collaboration with the world bank to address all these challenges to better the lives of Nigerian youths.

“Since we assumed office, our focus has been to achieve a strong coordinated mechanism for all youth interventions, focus on economic inclusion, provide jobs directly and indirectly for at least 10 million youth within the next five years, ensuring that youth is proficient in at least two income generating skills, expand our credit support funds by 50 million dollars to reach young people businesses and to increase Nigeria’s Youth -focused infrastructure” the Minister stressed.

In his presentation, the World bank economist and the leader of the team, Masheshwor Shrestha disclosed that his organisation is ready to engage Nigerian youths on three pathways . According to him, the first of these three pillars of engagement is to give them the skills and match them to a job that they are suited for.

The second is to facilitate, manage migration opportunities which would probably not give the jobs to everybody but it will relieve the stress on the economy, particularly, when there are no enough domestic jobs.

The third pillar,he added ,is the fallback employment and there could be safety net type support, like public works where they get some income but at the same time, use that as a platform to link them to more skilling entrepreneurship, and other opportunities that are out there.

“One of the key assets of this Ministry is the National Youth Service Corps(NYSC )program and because of the number of Youth NYSC touches every single year and throughout the year, it is a platform that is unequal to the rest. The idea here is to use it to leverage that platform”. Shrestha stated.

In his remarks, the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry, Olubunmi Olusanya stated that the Ministry will do everything possible to build on the existing collaboration with the World bank for a more robust opportunities for the youth of this country to thrive.

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