Nigeria’s youth employment strategy is facing a fundamental test as the Federal Government and the International Labour Organisation (ILO) review the Nigerian Youth Employment Action Plan (NIYEAP) 2025–2030.

Concerns remain that the country’s growing number of skills and employment programmes may still fail to translate training into sustainable jobs.

The central challenge, according to an analysis titled ‘Building the Systems That Get Young Nigerians into Work’ by a researcher, Lekan Olayiwola, is no longer the absence of youth employment policies but the lack of an integrated system linking skills development directly to employment outcomes.

Olayiwola argued that Nigeria risks adding another layer of policy commitments without addressing the structural gap between training and actual work.

He said the focus of the new NIYEAP should shift from counting the number of young people trained to measuring whether beneficiaries become competent, secure employment, remain economically active and experience improvements in earnings and productivity.

“Training is an input. Employment is an outcome,” he stated, noting that retention, earnings, productivity and career progression provide stronger measures of success than the number of people passing through government training programmes.

Nigeria’s labour market data underscore the concern, showing that unemployment alone does not capture the depth of the youth employment crisis.

According to the analysis, youth unemployment among Nigerians aged 15–24 stood at 8.4 per cent in the first quarter of 2024, while 14.4 per cent of young people were neither in employment, education nor training. The female NEET rate was higher at 15.9 per cent, while time-related underemployment stood at 10.6 per cent across the labour force.

The figures point to a wider problem: some young Nigerians work but are underutilised, while others remain trapped in precarious informal employment or hold certificates without the competencies employers demand.

Olayiwola called for a transition-based approach that tracks young people from education to skills acquisition, competency assessment and labour-market matching, and then from first employment to retention, income progression and decent work.

Under such a framework, major youth employment programmes would need to report not only the number of participants trained but also the proportion assessed as competent, those matched with employers or viable enterprises, those entering employment, and those still employed or economically active after 6 and 12 months.

They would also need to track earnings or business revenues, gender and geographical outcomes, and the cost of achieving each sustained employment outcome.

The proposed shift is significant because it would change the incentive structure for government programmes from activity-based reporting to employment delivery.

The analysis also places greater responsibility on employers, arguing that the private sector should become a co-producer of youth employment programmes rather than merely a stakeholder invited to meetings after policies have been designed.

Employers, it said, should help determine the competencies required, the number of workers likely to be needed, the locations of those opportunities and the entry-level pathways into employment.

This would require Nigeria to strengthen labour-market intelligence so that training programmes respond to actual and projected demand rather than simply producing skills in anticipation of jobs.

The policy analysis warned that African youth employment strategies have often placed too much emphasis on labour supply while paying too little attention to demand.

For Nigeria, with its large youth population, the consequence could be continued investment in training young people for jobs that do not exist.

It also cautioned against treating entrepreneurship as a universal substitute for wage employment, stressing that sustainable self-employment requires access to productive markets, finance, infrastructure, technology and business development services.

Olayiwola said the NIYEAP 2025–2030 reset should ultimately be judged on five tests: whether it creates demand for young workers; connects learning to work; reflects the realities of Nigeria’s formal and informal labour markets; measures sustained employment outcomes; and assigns responsibility for managing the entire transition from learning to work.

The broader objective, he argued, should be to build a youth labour-market transition system connecting labour-market intelligence with curricula, competency assessment with employers, employment services with job matching, entrepreneurship programmes with actual markets, and employment with social protection and workers’ rights.

For Nigeria, he said the test of the new action plan may not be how ambitious the policy document becomes, but whether it can show that public investment in youth employment programmes has produced measurable and sustained improvements in the lives of young Nigerians.

“Nigeria has revised youth employment plans before. What it needs now is not merely another plan that describes what institutions should do. It needs a system capable of demonstrating what changed in the lives of young people because they did it,” he added.