For years, Nigeria’s response to youth unemployment has largely centred on equipping young people with skills. But for many beneficiaries, the journey from training to economic independence often ends where the real challenge begins, GLORIA NWAFOR reports.

Despite years of youth empowerment initiatives, there appears to be a missing link often ignored. Finding a job, securing capital, accessing electricity and equipment, reaching markets or obtaining the infrastructure needed to turn skills into sustainable livelihoods.

That gap is at the heart of the ongoing review of the Nigeria Youth Employment Action Plan (NIYEAP) 2025–2030, as the Federal Government and its development partners confront a question that increasingly defines the country’s youth employment crisis: what happens after the training?

The question goes beyond the number of young Nigerians enrolled in skills programmes or the enterprises created through government interventions. It touches on the structure of the economy itself — whether businesses are expanding fast enough to absorb new workers, whether young entrepreneurs can access finance and markets, and whether public policy can connect skills development to sectors capable of generating sustainable employment.

As the government revises NIYEAP, stakeholders are pushing for a shift from programmes designed primarily around young people to an employment strategy built around economic opportunities into which they can plug their skills, labour and enterprise.

The existing ecosystem covers students, graduates, job seekers, young entrepreneurs, informal-sector workers, rural youth, young women, persons with disabilities and emerging professionals seeking meaningful pathways into work and enterprise.

The original NIYEAP 2021–2024 was built around four priority areas — employability, entrepreneurship, employment, and equality and rights — with the objective of contributing to decent, productive and freely chosen employment for young Nigerians.

The framework was also designed to coordinate fragmented interventions and strengthen multi-sector collaboration.

However, previous interventions have raised a fundamental question for the new plan: what happens when a young person acquires a skill but cannot find a job, secure finance, access electricity, obtain equipment or find a market for what he or she produces?

Stakeholders argue that Nigeria already has multiple youth programmes, skills initiatives, entrepreneurship schemes and employment interventions. The challenge confronting the review, therefore, is not simply how to equip more young Nigerians with skills, but how to connect those skills to employers, investment, infrastructure, finance, markets and decent work.

At a two-day employment workshop in Lagos, the Minister of Youth Development, Ayodele Olawande, said the private sector must play a central role because of its capacity to drive enterprise growth, investment, productivity and job creation.

He said the shared interest provided a basis for a stronger government-private sector partnership on youth employment and Nigeria’s broader economic development agenda.

The workshop, attended by representatives of the private sector, the International Labour Organisation (ILO), GIZ, the MacArthur Foundation, the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG), development partners, government institutions and youth-focused organisations, is aimed at developing a coordinated private-sector strategy for youth job creation, Olawande said.

According to him, one major gap in previous frameworks was the absence of a sufficiently developed and coordinated private-sector strategy focused specifically on youth employment.

Represented by the Ministry’s Deputy Director, Ebiho Agun, Olawande said the strategy would examine constraints limiting businesses from employing more young people, including policy and regulatory barriers, infrastructure, financing, skills shortages and other factors affecting investment and business growth.

He said the government would also seek private-sector input on future labour-market demand, the skills employers were likely to need over the next five to 10 years and investment opportunities capable of generating employment at scale.

The minister said gender and inclusion would form part of the strategy, stressing the need to ensure that jobs created were accessible to young women, persons with disabilities and other groups facing barriers to entering and remaining in the labour market.

He further disclosed that the Private Sector Technical Working Group, launched by the Minister of Youth Development in 2024, would serve as a platform for sustaining government-business engagement beyond the workshop.

Olawande said the objective was to move beyond identifying challenges to establishing practical actions, clear responsibilities and mechanisms for measuring results.

He noted that while young Nigerians needed decent, productive opportunities to build careers and livelihoods, Nigerian businesses also needed a skilled, productive and adaptable workforce to expand and remain competitive.

The Director of the ILO Office for Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone, Dr Vanessa Phala, spoke on the reforms, incentives and enabling conditions needed to unlock investment and employment, as well as what the private sector needed from government to invest, expand and create jobs.

Represented by the ILO Abuja Country Office, Augustine Erameh, Phala asked: “What policies, regulations, reforms, incentives and concessions are required? How can governments reduce the personal risk of doing business? That is the best way we can get what is required to advise the government on what policies to develop.”

She said the process was expected to examine ways to integrate youth-led enterprises into corporate supply chains, procurement and markets, particularly by addressing the financing, infrastructure, regulatory and market-access constraints limiting the growth of small businesses and their capacity to create jobs.

She said the Federal Ministry of Youth Development and ILO, with technical support under the Strengthening Employment and Employability Systems in Nigeria (SEESIN) project, were seeking a private-sector engagement framework that would define business participation, financing, partnerships, monitoring and accountability under the revised plan.

The revised framework, she said, was expected to go beyond commitments by establishing mechanisms to track employment outcomes, retention, internship conversion, enterprise survival, productivity and employer satisfaction.

Phala said the review also proposed a continuing private-sector implementation mechanism, potentially through a council or working group with sector clusters, quarterly reviews, a commitment tracker and a system for escalating policy and regulatory barriers constraining youth employment.

Priority areas under consideration, she said, included agriculture and agro-processing, construction, creative industries, ICT and digitalisation, technology, green economy, energy, manufacturing, trade and services.

According to her, the workshop was expected to produce a private-sector action matrix, government-enablement framework, financing and risk-sharing options, practical apprenticeship and internship models, and a prioritised portfolio of sectors and interventions for inclusion in the revised NIYEAP.

Commenting on the plan, policy analyst Lekan Olayiwola advised that NIYEAP should move from youth programmes to economic zones.

He said the plan should go beyond coordinating youth programmes to integrating infrastructure, finance, skills and private-sector demand around actual economic opportunities.

Olayiwola argued that NIYEAP’s success would depend less on the number of programmes implemented than on whether its four pillars — employability, entrepreneurship, employment creation, and equal rights and opportunities — could connect to viable economic activities in which young Nigerians could participate and earn.

He said the plan should consider developing Youth Economic Opportunity Zones or Youth Enterprise Clusters that would bring together training, infrastructure, finance, production facilities, logistics and market access, rather than leaving young entrepreneurs to navigate these requirements separately.

A young person starting a business, he noted, might need land, electricity, finance, registration, equipment, digital connectivity, logistics, skills and access to customers, even though responsibility for these areas was spread across different institutions.

He said NIYEAP could therefore build on its proposed mechanisms for private-sector participation, sectoral clusters, commitment tracking and employment-outcome reporting by integrating resources controlled by different institutions around specific economic opportunities.

Olayiwola cited Special Economic Zones in South Africa as one example of how infrastructure, investment facilitation and productive activities could be concentrated geographically, but cautioned that such zones should not be regarded as a substitute for a broader employment strategy.

He noted that South Africa continued to record high youth unemployment despite investment and employment generated around its productive zones, stressing that Nigeria should ensure that any youth economic zones were connected to surrounding communities and the wider labour market.

He also drew lessons from Ghana’s One District One Factory initiative, saying its emphasis on decentralised industrial production, private-sector participation and links between local resources and markets offered useful insights for NIYEAP.

Olayiwola said the youth employment debate should shift from asking how many young people had been trained to determining where young people could participate in value chains and generate income.

Young Nigerians, he said, could participate as agricultural producers, processors, equipment operators, logistics providers, packaging suppliers, distributors, digital service providers or employees of anchor companies, depending on the sector.

He also cited Rwanda’s Special Economic Zones as an example of the benefits of combining infrastructure, productive space, investment facilitation and business services, arguing that skills development should similarly be tied to actual labour-market demand.

According to him, an agricultural youth cluster could combine serviced land, irrigation, renewable energy, storage, processing, transport, technical training and finance with established routes to processors or institutional buyers.

Creative-industry clusters, he said, could provide studios, production facilities, broadband, equipment, intellectual-property support, finance and distribution channels, while digital clusters could connect reliable connectivity and workspaces with talent development, technology companies, corporate procurement, investment and export opportunities.

Olayiwola stressed that government would not need to provide all the facilities, noting that NIYEAP’s co-creation framework already provides for participation by employers, development partners, technology companies and sector-specific businesses.

The next step, he said, should be to turn those relationships into functioning economic ecosystems involving power companies, property developers, financial institutions, manufacturers, logistics firms, universities and technical and vocational education providers.

He identified demand as a major missing element in Nigeria’s youth employment strategy, warning that investment in training and skills development could produce more employable young people without necessarily creating jobs if sufficient demand for their labour and products did not exist.

He therefore urged policymakers to design youth economic zones around questions such as who would buy the products, which companies needed particular skills, which manufacturers required suppliers, and which exporters, aggregators and distributors could provide markets.

Olayiwola said that since NIYEAP already recognised supply-chain integration, market access, apprenticeships, workforce partnerships and future labour demand as strategic issues, youth economic zones could provide an operational framework for implementing those priorities.

He further called for a stronger data-driven approach to measuring the plan’s outcomes.

“Rather than focusing mainly on the number of people trained, enterprises registered or programmes implemented, NIYEAP should track enterprise survival, sustained employment and income, skills shortages, employer demand, infrastructure constraints and overlaps among government programmes,” he said.

According to him, such data would help connect fragmented government information systems around the economic opportunities NIYEAP seeks to create.

He argued that employability should feed entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship should feed employment creation, while infrastructure, finance and markets should support both, with equal opportunity determining access to the resulting economic opportunities.