Shode Olukayode, south-west zonal coordinator of Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN), has urged youths to focus on agribusiness and entrepreneurship in order to reduce the alarming rate of unemployment in the country.
Olukayode made this call recently in Akure, the Ondo state capital during the training and empowering of 160 youths on developing agribusiness in Ondo state.
The six-day entrepreneurship training which was organized for some selective cooperative organisations was aimed at encourage youths, particularly, young farmers to go back to farming and to increase country’s exportation in order to reduce poverty among youths.
He said that participants with innovative ideas would be given financial and technical support through entrepreneurship training.
According to him, the training and empowerment programme was a yearly programme and Federal Government initiative to support cooperative organisations saying Ondo and Ogun State was choose from South West to partake in 2021.
Read also: Nigeria needs to mechanise agriculture to attract youths – Experts
The zonal coordinator, who said that all the participants were drawn from the 18 Local Government Area of Ondo State, however, noted that Ogun State was the next state to benefit from the programme.
Also speaking, Oluyomi Faniyan, assistant director of SMEDAN, Abuja, said the federal and state governments are working restlessly to encourage youths to take up farming owing to its vast potentials.
“Now that oil has failed us, we must go back to farm so that we can increase our export. Lack of exportation is what is affecting the Nigerian naira today,” Faniyan said.
Similarly, Muhammed Jamiu Enas, chairman of Sunshine Cooperative Society in Akure South Local Government, who spoke on behalf of other participants, urged the Federal Government not to relent on the programme so that poverty within the farmers could be the thing of pass and youths could take farming as a job instead of looking for white cola job.
Speaking earlier, Governor Oluwarotimi Akeredolu, charged youths in the state to venture into entrepreneurship in order to contribute more meaningfully to the nation’s economic growth and development.
Akeredolu, who was represented by Bunmi Ademosun, his Special Adviser on multilateral and inter-governmental affairs, said that it was time youths defied all odds and shine with their innovations and creative geniuses.
