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The Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC), Prof. Tunji Olaopa, has listed measures that could be deployed by the government to stem the tide of youth unemployment in Nigeria. While delivering the 17th Convocation Lecture of Bells University of Technology, Ota, Ogun State, on Friday, Olaopa noted the huge population of youth that could be converted into national capital. Olaopa, who spoke on the topic “The Nigerian Youth and the Challenges of Unemployment and Skills Mismatch in National Development”, however, deplored a situation where such a huge population is allowed to waste due to outright under-employment or outright unemployment. Olaopa urged a stronger connection between the formal and informal education sub-sectors on the continuum of learning and training as a key to progress. In this connection, he said effort should be made to resolve the challenges being faced with the implementation of the “students industrial work experience scheme (SIWES), currently stalled due to total lack of synergy between students’ inchoate theoretical learning with a crippling lack of practical experiential learning functionally linked to workplace and labour market demands.” Olaopa specifically identified a local solution to the unemployment crisis, urging that the Igbo apprenticeship system should be encouraged as a nationwide job creation and entrepreneurship consolidation programme. He described the system as one that thrives on pairing apprentices with experienced mentors for guidance and support. Adopting this system nationwide, according to him, will require the establishment of a national framework of action setting it out to deepen existing apprenticeship systems, outlining appropriate standards for mentors and mentees, specification of training duration, and certification procedures, including the setting up of a programme self-evaluation mechanism and regulatory system. He said that it would also require partnerships with industry to deploy it to reinvent and consolidate the SIWES, and that this would entail having the Industrial Training Fund (ITF), NDE, etc., to undertake the identification of in-demand skills among the targeted youth, and the implementation of a systematic programme to match them with their apprentices’ interests and aptitudes. “A well-equipped, supportive startup training set of hubs to provide hands-on learning support to provide systematic learning of supportive skills as generating funding proposals, recordkeeping, etc., will be essential”, he added. Olaopa blamed the crisis of youth unemployment on factors that he said could be linked to the largely untransformed structure of the national economy. “Indeed, the growth trajectory of the Nigerian economy has been largely uneven and socially non-inclusive”, he said. Consequently, the economy has been generating limited sources of new employment, a low-employment intensity, which is the key defining attribute of a non-diversified economy that is heavily and monoculturally dependent on oil and gas He also blamed past reforms to restore the functional link between education, job creation, and the employability of graduates, which tends to be skewed in favour of formal education. As he put it: “Whereas the informal sector of the economy is the largest job creator in Nigeria, limited attention has been accorded to building the skills needed nor has policy creativity been deployed enough to support the productivity and other required structural changes to unlock the potential of the informal sector in Nigeria. “In a more concrete sense, past policies have concentrated resources and expertise in the former technical, vocational education and training (TVET), to the detriment of the traditional apprenticeship and non-formal training “In spite of recent priority focus on TVET, there still does not exist a self-evaluation and regulatory mechanism for TVET institutions. The current AfDB-supported FG programme to deepen the implementation of the national vocational qualification framework (NVQF) directed at the incorporation of standardized certification procedures as a way of increasing the capacity of traditional apprenticeship and non-formal training to generate employment in the informal sector, is unarguably a step in the right direction. “The new policy and programme, if pursued to its logical conclusion, will no doubt check the mismatch between employment opportunities available in the labour market, and the type of qualifications and certification produced by education and training institutions.” ALSO READ TOP STORIES FROM NIGERIAN TRIBUNE
