“Your National Visioning Process (NVP) which seeks to gather ideas, data using various formats is a signature initiative, that would be hugely beneficial not just to your organisation but to the Ministry because whatever is fed into that process will help us, our budgeting process and the trainings we have, the digital skills training, training in about five key areas, pertaining to the Youth.”
With these remarks, the Minister of Youth and Sports Development, Sunday Dare set the tone for the interactive session with the delegation of the Nigeria Youth Future Funds (NYFF) who paid him a courtesy visit in his office on Monday.
The co-chair of the NYFF board, Chineye Nwanaka in her submission highlighted the mandate areas of the NYFF to include National Visioning Process (NYP); Youth Leadership Development and Online & Media Engagement. She emphasised that the visit, apart from affording the organisation the opportunity to brief the Minister on its activities which include giving grants to entreprenuers and tech hubs, capacity building trainings amongst others, would also enable the exploration of areas of collaboration with the Ministry on Youth Development.
“What I really like about our Youth Leadership Development are the programmes that we have with the Universities – developing curriculum that target various critical skill sets that young people need to thrive. A lot of people complain that young people graduate from the University and are not employment ready, they don’t have the skill set to compete in the global economy. Part of what we are doing is partnering with key institutions to try and put this into the curriculum to ensure we leverage on e-learning skills and capacity building for young people,” Ms Nwanaka added.
The Minister in his response lauded the NYFF for its laudable initiatives, corroborating the organisation’s position that there is a mismatch between the degrees being churned out and the jobs available, stating that this necessitated the cyber security training facilitated by the Ministry because half a million jobs were discovered available in the sector as at 2021, but no certified cyber security experts to fill them.
“Cyber security training is a specialised type of training so we partnered with Halogen and the first two days when we announced that training, 61,000 youth applied. We are managing to train about 10,000, to get them certified. With that certification, virtually out of every 5 organisations, 3 of them are looking for cyber security experts.
“You know why? We are living in a digital world, we have cyber attacks. So we look forward to really getting the profile on NVP, details of it, then we explore areas we can plug into,” he assured.
The Minister admonished the organisation to look beyond urban youth in its outreach, stating that research has shown that 56% of youth between the ages of 15 to 35 are domiciled in the rural areas. He expressed the readiness of the Ministry to partner with NYFF to expand access to its signature youth development programmes like the Digital Entrepreneurship Empowerment Leadership (DEEL) scheme and the National Youth Investment Fund (NYIF) amongst others.
