Young Nigerians and urgency of task at hand

Few countries are as heart-breaking as Nigeria, because few countries have held as much unfulfilled potential and broken as many promises. And perhaps the most significant promise the country has broken is to its young people. By failing at public education and healthcare, public infrastructure and ultimately at governance, Nigeria has committed a moral crime […]

Few countries are as heart-breaking as Nigeria, because few countries have held as much unfulfilled potential and broken as many promises. And perhaps the most significant promise the country has broken is to its young people. By failing at public education and healthcare, public infrastructure and ultimately at governance, Nigeria has committed a moral crime in constraining the creativity of its youth. And this at a time of overwhelming possibilities. There is an irony here. Nigeria has no possible future outside a sprawling youth population inspired to rise to the challenges of the day. There are pockets of brilliance that hint at what is a possible, cluster of creativity in the tech and social sectors, in art and in entertainment. But they are largely urban and not enough, and have to struggle too hard to survive. 

Urgent interventions are a question of individual and collective survival. They must transcend petty politics, and put power in the hands of young people. This will require a network of dedicated collaborators across every level of government, the private sector, civil society, and youth groups. How do we leverage technology to bridge skill gaps and create jobs? How do we execute agendas that radically foster financial and social inclusion? These are central questions, and the answers are hidden within the education-skills-employment value chain. 

A recent World Bank report shows that “four in ten people who are ‘not in education, employment, or training’ (NEET) have senior secondary education or higher.” In other words, many educated Nigerians cannot find jobs largely because the institutions designed to facilitate the transition from school to work are decrepit. No matter how we look at it, the most critical vehicle we have to reverse this is government. Part of what we can do is to identify initiatives that make expansive efforts to tackle the problem, and then strengthen and replicate these endeavours. And the truth is, almost every government has had one or two such projects, under competent administrators, that are sometimes overwhelmed by understandable negative press or that fall victim to government discontinuance. Currently, the N-Power Programme, managed in the office of the Vice-President, is quietly addressing these issues on notable scale. 

The N-Power Programme, an initiative of the federal government’s National Social Investment Programme and the Job Creation Unit in the Presidency, is an egalitarian system with a national spread that recruits 500,000 young people between the ages of 18-35, equips them with digital devices that contain applicable knowledge in a range of fields, and deploys them across four key sectors: education, agriculture, health and tax/revenue. The programme is sufficiently ambitious, absorbing thousands of graduates, re-training them in valuable job market skills, and deploying them to work in underserved communities across the country, while paying them a N30,000 stipend. In less than two years N-Power has recruited 200,000 graduates from every state in the country through a transparent process, a government-driven internship programme of impressive scale. 

A visit to N-Power’s Facebook page and subsequent interaction with beneficiaries shows the impact of the programme on the ground, with testimonials of young people from Jigawa to Benue to Ibadan to Imo to Akwa-Ibom. Part of what stands out from the feedback is how innovative and entrepreneurial young people can be when given the opportunity. A number of the volunteers have formed themselves into cooperative societies and are leveraging their stipends to start small businesses and generate wealth. Others like Isome Anakhu, a graduate of Microbiology from Madonna University, Okija, an N-Power Health volunteer working at the Uyo Primary Health Centre, have gone from little applicable knowledge to operating a Partec Cyflow Counter II lab test machine, HIV testing and confirmation, and the managing of HIV positive patients through regular monitoring of their CD4 count. Taiwo, a 19- year- old female graduate is learning to build welding and fabricating machines for rural communities under N-Build, N-Power’s skill acquisition arm with 250 Standard Training Centres across Nigeria. 

What we must strive to do under the mounting urgency we are faced with as a country, is keep political manoeuvrings aside as we pursue inclusive growth, continually exploring how we can strengthen, tweak and sustain initiatives like N-Power, that marry technology with ethnic and religious agnostic frameworks to drive human capital solutions. Young people across the country are connected to the world in new ways and are increasingly aware they are being left behind. We have to commit to alleviating their frustrations and liberating their potential, to arming them with tools of intelligence and setting them loose on the complex and ambitious tasks of the day. As such, initiatives like N-Power are low hanging fruits that show how much more we can do, on a radically inclusive scale, with available technology, with ample political will and collaboration across divides, with young people.  

Azino wrote this piece from Abuja.