The Senior Special Assistant to the President on Job Creation and Youth Empowerment, Mr Afolabi Imoukhuede, has said that the federal government plans to engage 7,000 youths across the country in software development programmes under the N-power initiative.
N-Power is a programme initiated by the Federal Government to address the challenge of youth unemployment by providing a structure for large scale and relevant work skills acquisition and development while linking its core and outcomes to fixing inadequate public services and stimulating the larger economy.
Imoukhuede said that the programme would be introduced as part of the mandate of the scheme to economically empower the youth in the country.
He noted that no fewer than 50,000 Nigerian youth were already engaged in skills acquisition programmes in different parts of the country with additional 500,000 graduates engaged as volunteers in N-Agro, N-Teach and N-Health since 2016.
The presidential aide said there is need for the country to begin to use technology or new thinking to solve some perennial challenges confronting the country.
“We are to stimulate a lot in young people for them to begin to think out of the box or even imagine a no box at all and really bring up ideas,” he said.
Imoukhuede emphasised the need for the country to strengthen efforts toward unlocking the potential in Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) through technological innovations.
He stated: “SMEs are greater core not only to our youth but to all, and that is where an average youth will blend as a micro player. In looking at job creation, we realised that SMEs are the engine of any formidable economy.
“So for us, we looked at it that it was with the least attention or the greatest challenge. We designed strategies targeted at unlocking the binding constraints that had hitherto hampered the successful entry of our micro enterprises into mainstream business. That is one of the areas we looked at because that in many ways is to unlock entrepreneurship.
When you begin to look at unemployment we must wake up to the reality that the white collar jobs are not there in the number to match the number of our teeming graduates that are getting to the labour market. So the earlier we begin to redirect them in the area of innovations using technology to promote entrepreneurship the better for us.”