Stakeholders On How To Improve Youth Employment

CONVINCING youths to embrace self-employment as a veritable option, has been identified as most critical of challenges confronting the problem of youth employment in Kano State.

To this end, there is urgent need to counsel the unemployed for attitudinal re-orientation towards self-employment and self-reliance.

This was the position of the State Coordinator, National Directorate of Employment (NDE) Kano State Office, Aliyu Abubakar Bichi, at a one-day Stakeholders Consultative Meeting on Youth Employment and Empowerment, organised by Resource Centre for Human Rights and Civil Education (CHRICED), held at Royal Tropicana Hotel, Kano.

“Another critical, and not less worse challenge, has been that of dwindling resources over the years. The task of job creation involves resource-demanding inputs with high costs. Since the days of the global economic meltdown, low budgetary allocations had grossly affected number of those that can be imparted with skills and empowered with takeoff capital.

Bichi stated that insufficient or non-employment friendly economic growth such as that based on production of primary goods, especially from extractive industry (oil or solid mineral), primary agricultural products-no value addition; lack of institutions to guide and support them in choosing a career and securing jobs; inherent barriers to enterprise development support and promotion, particularly in gaining access to skills in creating business idea; financial and social capital and interference/influence/personal interests in certain cases, among others are also part of the challenges.

To check these challenges, he noted that sustained efforts must be geared towards employment generation and provision of employment subsidies through contribution to salary, tax breaks or preferential treatment in public tendering; promotion of youth entrepreneurship and vocational skills-strengthening quality training.

The NDE boss stressed that over time it has been observed that years of searching for wage employment and other means of livelihood has set in the Nigerian youth disillusionment. “It is now documented even by the World Bank, that unemployment and disillusionment are two menaces of equal adverse effect on the society and economy.

“In response to this development, there is the need for all employment agencies to borrow a leaf from the NDE by designing a counselling function that is a necessary component of all its training Programmes.”

He said counselling function should be such that it will assist the youths to understand the self in the context of society and economy; assist the youths to understand fully the challenges of unemployment and poverty; understand the ethical and moral foundations of success and understand the future in relation to the present, among others.