TETFund, IFC hold National Employability Benchmarking Programme

One of the major crises rocking the country is unemployment. However, unemployment of graduate from Nigeria’s tertiary institution appears more worrisome.
Annually, thousands of youths are churned out into the labour market without any hope of securing the kind of employment that will guarantee a decent living. Experts in different fields of endeavour have attempted to proffer solution to the problem. Unfortunately, not much result has been achieved over the years.

It is to improve employability and help steer higher education institutions towards better alignment with market needs that the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) came up with an initiative that aimed at resolving the lingering challenge.

Early in the month in Abuja, the Fund under the leadership of Arc. Sunny Echono, conducted a National Employability Benchmarking Programme for stakeholders and leadership of Nigerian higher education institutions. The programme was organised in collaboration with International Finance Corporation (IFC).

IFC was utilising its Vitae employability tool to provide a diagnostic macro snapshot of how well tertiary institutions in the country are implementing employability best-practices, establishing a baseline for employability as well as potentially, supporting the development of a strategic approach to sector intervention.

IFC Vitae is a global first-of-a-kind, survey-based, diagnostic instrument, which assesses, processes, structures and supports employability outcomes for higher education institutions. The program provides system and institutional-level insights that helps identify key intervention areas that will enhance the employability ecosystem and improve graduate employability outcomes.

Consequently, at the recent stakeholder roundtable, the Executive Secretary, TETFund, Sonny Echono expressed the Fund’s commitment towards developing an active labour market for graduates.

He said: “One of the key roles of TETFund is to develop an enabling system for young graduates to be part of the active labour market soon after graduation. This diagnostic led by the IFC is the first phase of designing an intervention to improve graduate employability outcomes.”

According to him, the program will help to improve where higher education institutions in the country are presently in relation to global best practices. He noted that the first stage of the programme was to develop a snapshot of current employability practices with the aim of specifically understanding how the current regulatory policy framework may act as an enabler or barrier to success. He said: “The focus of the programme first state was to collect, validate and analyse the data of participating universities in Nigeria.”

The stage was coordinated by Cognity Advisory, a local development consultancy, working on behalf of TETFund with IFC global employability experts. IFC Vitae has been deployed in different countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and the Caribbean to hundreds of higher education institutions to help them in developing a pathway for improving graduate outcomes and implementing institutional goals for graduate employability.

“The recent stakeholder roundtable in Abuja brought together leadership from Nigerian higher education institutions and provided an opportunity to share early findings from the program, highlight policy and process gaps as well as discuss sector-level and institutional opportunities for improvement of practices supporting graduate employability.

The National Employability Benchmarking Programme is coordinated by TETFund with the support of the Federal Ministry of Education and the National Universities Commission (NUC).