NYFF launches agenda to support youths leadership

Ahead of the 2023 general elections, the Nigeria Youth Futures Fund (NYFF), has launched an agenda ‘National Visioning Project’ in Abuja.

The project is aimed at supporting and strengthening youth leadership in Nigeria.

The group also stated that it will mobilize youths who comprise more than 70 per cent of Nigeria’s population across the six Geo-Political Zones to vote for leaders on competence and capacity.

The Project Lead of NYFF, Opeyemi Oriniowo, who stated this in Abuja, explained that NYFF National Visioning Project was a collaborative initiative of LEAP Africa, MacArthur Foundation and Ford Foundation, to strengthen young people for youth leadership, activism and social change.

He said: “Through this initiative, we seek to empower over 70 per cent of Nigeria’s population who constitute the youth population. This 2023 election is going to be issue-based, we don’t intend to vote on the basis of ethnicity or religion. And for the first time, we are trying to develop an agenda that will represent the interests of young people in the country.

“What we are trying to do for the first time is to get a document that will represent the collective aspirations of young people across the country and to achieve this, we decided to take this exercise to each of the states so we have converges across the entire country where we met with young people in each region, covering the entire six Geo-Political Zones of Nigeria.

“We are not inheriting a country where you currently see in terms of governance solely being dictated on ethnic lines or religious lines, we see young people talk about the issues that really matter to them, issues of unemployment, issues of insecurity and issues of social cohesion.”

Adding: “We are going to interact with the candidates of the 2023 elections. It is a collective aspiration of youths to see how well each of these candidates are able to mainstream our voice, this agenda that we develop as the voices of young people.”

Also speaking, the Director of Programmes, LEAP Africa, Amabelle Nwakanma, emphasized the importance of mainstreaming the voices of young people in Nigeria and across Africa.

She further said that it was essential that youths are active participants in national development.

Also, Chima Christian, a delegate from the South-East at the National visioning exercise, expressed the importance of the exercise in contributing towards a new Nigeria that upholds the principle of fairness, equity and justice for all geo-political regions.

Halimah Tauheed, a delegate from the North-Central region and lecturer at the Federal University of Technology, Minna, expressed her gratitude to the organizers of the retreat.

She canvassed a holistic capturing of youth voices in the geo-political region, adding that: “It was evident over the past few years that the youths of Nigeria are not lazy. We have gone to take very great interest in governance, politics and nation-building.”