The National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) Director General, Brigadier General, Suleiman Ibrahim, has raised concern over the inadequate financing of corps empowerment saying it is the major challenge
of the scheme’s Skill Acquisition and Entrepreneurship Development (SAED) programme.
He pleaded with stakeholders to spread the opportunities of empowerment fairly and evenly among corps members across the country.
The DG made the plea Monday at the 2021 NYSC SAED stakeholders’ meeting and training of SAED desk officers’ at the scheme’s headquarters conference room, Abuja.
Ibrahim said lack of skill and entrepreneurial training facilities, business start-up capital; access to mentorship as well as insufficient bilateral and multilateral collaborations to bridge the shortfall in all in the lacks.
Giving his opening remarks, the director, SAED, Mr Hilary Nasamu, said so much has been done in one year despite the COVI-19 pandemic.
Saying the luck down did not.hampered the scheme’s efforts as so much has been done in one year to make a huge positive difference and improve the scorecards of the SAED initiatives.
He said inadequate government financing necessitates the re-direction of its sights on private sector partnership and that some of the positive development include the Bank of Industry that has accepted to revive and reinvigorate the Graduates Empowerment Fund (GEF) which in the past empowered over 500 corps members with business loans on completion of skill and entrepreneurial training. Listing the gains of partnership entered with twelve different organisations, Nasamu said: “Unity Bank-funded bankable business proposal competition called Corpreneurship has led to the empowerment of 36 star prize winners with funds ranging from N500,000, N300,000 to N200,000 while British America Tobacco Nigeria Foundation (BATNF)-funded farmers for the Future Programme first pilot had one corps members winning the five million naira star prize but that with the current MoU guarantee from the selection process of 2020 and 2021, all available prizes will go to the corps participants,” he said.
He said NYSC is in partnership with The Entrepreneurship Development Centre (EDE), Access Bank, Leventis Foundation Nigeria (LFN), NIRSAL MFB, National Directorate of Employment (NDE), Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN), SAEDConnect Platform and National Centre for Technology Management (NACETEM) among many others.
He also said the scheme has revitalised the partnership with a Consortium of IT and Management Organisations such as Dragnet, Sigma Pensions, BlogMe and Gr8tjobs, to establish the jobs portal and CV bank which is now up and running.
