BREAKING NEWS, Youth
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The Nigerian government will set up job centres to gather data of the unemployed in all the states of the federation by March 2017
| By Anayo Ezugwu | Oct 31, 2016 @ 01:00 GMT |
THE federal government has announced that it would locate job centres in all local government areas across the country before the end of March 2017. The government stated that the job centres, with at least one in every local government, will be used to gather data on the actual number of unemployed persons in the country.
The government is perfecting all requisite processes needed to actualise this. During a panel discussion on Tuesday, October 18, on addressing Nigeria’s unemployment challenge at the 48th Annual National Conference of the Chartered Institute of Personnel Management of Nigeria in Abuja, Paul Adalikwu, permanent secretary, Federal Ministry of Labour and Employment, stated that the centres would address the lack of data for unemployed persons, adding that currently, no one seemed to know the exact number of jobless people across the country.
Adalikwu said desk officers would be stationed at the outfits to encourage unemployed graduates to come and register their data in order to boost planning. The government will occasionally get and collate data from all the centres and will adequately decide what to do with respect to job creation. This development will help enhance computation on budgetary provisions for the creation of jobs in the states.
The permanent secretary also said that the government had increased the number of skill acquisition centres and that this was in order to enhance the capacities of the unskilled and semi-skilled workforce in the country.
The federal government had in September said it would expend N2 billion on the Graduate Internship Scheme before the end of the year as part of efforts to fight unemployment among educated Nigerian youths. Dennis Chukwu, project director of the scheme, revealed that the scheme being funded by the federal ministry of finance is currently training about 2,000 graduate interns across the country on skills and career development that would make them employers of labour, rather than job seeker.
He noted that President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration decided to sustain the scheme initiated by the past administration owing to his desire to banish unemployment ravaging the potentials of Nigerian graduates by exposing them to training and opportunities in every sector of the economy. Chukwu said the scheme had excited 35,000 interns, with thousands of them securing jobs in the civil service and in the business sector, contributing immensely to the growth of the economy.
“Many secured credit facilities and grants through YouWin, and other sources to expand businesses they set up using GIS stipends and many have set up through cooperative associations, some of which have transformed into SMEs; and rather than seeking for jobs, they are now employers of labour.
“In view of its prospect for skills building and job creation, the scheme has developed special programmes for non-oil sector. The GIS has entered into special partnerships with governmental and non-governmental organisations to have graduates trained in ICT, agriculture, community health, construction, financial inclusion and the feedbacks of their performances with employers have been encouraging,” he said.
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