Abia completes census of unemployed youths

State Education-For-Employment adopts NBTE curriculum

There are plans by the Abia State Education-For-Employment (E4E) to adopt the National Board for Technical Education ( NBTE) approved curriculum.

The E4E is a programme under which youths are trained in practical and specific vocational and technical skills.

This was stated by the state Education Commissioner Prof Ikechi Mgbeoji at an E4E stakeholders meeting with another batch of Vocational Education Trainers/Teachers held at recently in Umuahia.

He explained that the programme became imperative to arrest growing youth unemployment and dearth of technically skilled manpower required by industries and the public and empower the graduates to become not only self-employed but employers of labour.

According to the Commissioner, it becomes laughable and waste of time when after leaving school, the leaver cannot engage self in worthy employment on oneself because he did not acquire practical skill.

“This is what E4E is created by governor Okezie Ikpeazu to address. He no longer wants this scenario to thrive because we paid the price when the roads, buildings and other facilities built in the past could no longer be maintained because of absence of technical expertise. Vocational /Technical Education must now be part of Abia School Curriculum,” he said.

The E4E State Coordinator, Endi Ezengwa of Kiara College, United Kingdom, who has relocated to Nigeria, said E4E is competency based while the graduates would be certificated after their training in line with the dictates of the NBTE.

He said that while the census of unemployed youths in the state has been done with a view to knowing the number that would expectedly apply for the E4E for which already, not less than 45,000 had registered / applied, the various skills in which they will be trained were determined by the needs of industries and the economy.

According to the information gathered from the Science, Technical and Higher Education Division of the state Education Ministry, there are already 30 Development Centers or Skills Acquisition Centers covering the 17 LGAs of the state to which necessary technical tools were being shipped where the trainees will be exposed to practical training sessions beside the three designated equipped technical schools in each of the three senatorial zones of the state at Aba, Umuahia and Ohafia.