NDE has trained 11, 300 IDPs, Boko Haram repentants – DG

Director General, National Directorate of Employment, Dr Mohammed Ladan speaks to some select journalists on activities of the directorate in the last 32 years, and how the agency has positively impacted Nigeria’s teeming unemployed youth.
MOSES JOHN reports.

Tackling unemployment is your mandate.
How well has the agency fared? As you are aware, we have been around for the past 32 years, and the mandate given to us by the government is to create job and provide employment through entrepreneurial skills development.
And that is what we are doing and as far as I am concerned, on the issue of unemployment, NDE is the heartbeat and backbone to reckon with.
If you look at our spread, we have offices in all the six geo-political zones, and also in all the 37 states including FCT.
Out of the 774 local governments in the country, we have desk offices in 691 of them, we have 74 plus the one that was recently acquired in Katsina.
Hundreds of millions were sunk into that all with the hope of training young Nigerians in various skills and modern agric techniques.
In NDE, we have four basic departments which are Vocational Skills Development (VSD).
If you can recall early last year, we came up with a programme called Mega Basic National Open Apprenticeship Scheme, where we took in 76,400 young men and women at a go, 2,000 per state, but Lagos, Rivers and Katsina were given 4000 each.
Also, about 11, 300 Internally Displaced Persons plus 248 Boko Haram reformists were trained in collaboration with the Nigerian military and other interest groups.
Also, under same department, we have what is called Graduates Attachment Programme (GAP).
It is a programme whereby young graduates who finished their degree without doing anything, will be moped out and attached to which trade they wish to learn,and we are paying them fifteen thousand naira every month.
Even in the area of education, there is this graduate coaching scheme in every locality.
Some of these graduates who have nothing doing, we get across to them to train some young men and women who have deficiency in their SSCE, WAEC, and even JAMB to give them good training so they can rewrite their exams so as to go to the university or polytechnics of their choice.
Those ones we are paying them ten thousand naira every month.
Also, one good thing that we did, when I came to NDE was that, they are training the youths on over 80 skills, but after looking at it I decided to streamline it to just 15 based on demand-driven, and certain areas which we believe once you are trained, you will be a hot cake in the community.
Our choice of cosmetology And that is why we gave 70 percent to cosmotology, reason been the period of time to train them is less, resettlement is less and also, we are dealing with women because they are vulnerable.
Through our various offices in the states, we issued them forms to tell us whatever trade they wanted to be trained in, be it GSM repair, auto electrician, and host of others.
We are however succeeding.
Unlike before, because we don’t move anybody, but you have to be trained in your locality by an identified master trainer who is good at that.
Also, a logbook will be given, attendant register and identity card.
We also asked them to give us their bank details including BVN, the same thing with the master trainer so that at the end of the month, we will send their stipends directly into their accounts.
The only condition is that they must attend up to 20 times in a month and once they fulfilled that condition and everything was send to us, we will send their money to them.
And by doing that we have eliminate the issue of competition, because, for instance, you are the one that trained him within the same locality and if you have excess jobs, you will be glad to share with him.
We also realised that why there wasn’t much impact before now is because after training people, you don’t give them working tools or starter pack.
You have succeeded in wasting their time and also your time too.
So, we look at the possibility of giving them working tools and starter pack, unlike before whereby you trained a young man in barbing and you gave him clippers, generator and other equipment, there and then he will sale them.
What we are doing now will make it difficult in the sense that you need to have a guarantor, write an undertaking so that you can be monitored through our various units to know the progress.
Like in our cosmetology pack, it’s written ‘not for sale’ so that it can be utilised for the purpose it’s meant for.
Also even if you gave someone working tools and they started producing, when there is no market for his product or the market is saturated, it is another waste of time and they will be discouraged.
So, when we came on board we spoke to NEMA and National Commission for the Refugees so that whatever our trainees produce, we take to them and they pay us and we pay our trainees just to encourage them.
We are also working with NAFDAC and Standard Organization of Nigeria on how to package the product so that with both NAFDAC and SON, our trainees can sell their product anywhere.
Another department is special public works, this is a department that deals directly with something in form of direct labour.
Any time I came out in the morning, there were these young men with the working tools by the roadside looking for job.
I told the Director in charge to speak with most of these multinational companies within and outside Abuja.
After that, I asked him to go round and informed these young men to form small groups and get their details.
And we spoke with the multinationals, luckily enough, a lot of them have been absorbed while some have even be converted from casual to permanent.
Under Small Scale Enterprises, it is a department that deals with small scale businesses.
Loan facility We do give loan but since the inception of NDE about 32 years ago, 3.5 billion naira was given out as loan, some people even deposited original copies of their credentials.
But as at last month, what have been recovered was just 248 million naira.
People are not paying, and out of those who are paying, 90 percent of them are those that took small loan like 30,40, and 50,000.
Those that enjoyed big loan like 100 thousand and above are not paying completely.
Also, 90 percent of those who are paying back their loan are women because women are better as far as loan repayment is concerned.
Basic training We also came up with the idea of basic business training, whereby we talk to people with established businesses.
Those that apply to us, we will look at how viable the business is and we make it tight as far issue of defaulting is concerned before we give them loan.
This is because it is the ones that we recovered that we give out.
So, it is just like a revolving loan, and honestly because of the encouragement I am giving to the team, the loan recovery is good within the last one year.
We still have to give to those that apply and fulfill all the conditions.
We also believe that we can take care of the Centre once we can take care of the periphery.
If you go down to these villages, it is our mothers that take care of the home.
Some of them, because of what they are producing, their capital Is not more than five thousand.
We encourage them to form cooperative society within their locality, we give them twenty thousand naira to add to their capital and the repayment modality is one hundred naira monthly.
The way we do this is that , once we get to the village, and the twenty women who we gave the money, would be monitored by the additional women who are on the line for the loan.
We ask them to look out for the ones we gave the loan so that when they repay we can then give to the next batch.
And these other women do it in collaboration with traditional and religion leaders.
Libya returnees I was in Edo state to train about 2000 of the returnees.
The governor requested that we train additional 2000 for him.
We went to the shelter where the returnees were kept and I can tell you that those girls are intelligent and most of them have existing businesses in Nigeria like hair dressing and the rest of them.
What we did in collaboration with NAPTIP, was to use them as trainers because they are very good.
We are also doing the same thing in collaboration with other state government.
Budgeting It is a general issue.
To be frank with you there is a certain amount of money given to NDE on a monthly basis since 2004, purposely for the payment of stipends to trainees and trainers; the money is strictly for that.
Despite the fact that there are small challenges in the 2018 budget, but as I speak to you, it has been resolved and soonest those that we engaged that are yet to pay stipends since December last year, would be paid.
And in a stipulated time, we would also give out starter pack.
On cosmetology we gave out 13,000, we are preparing to give to the second badge, on that we are expecting to settle about 42.000 women.

Leave a Reply