Appraising the National Jubilee Fellows and other empowerment programmes

The Federal Government of Nigeria recently introduced another youth empowerment programme known as the National Jubilee Fellows Programme (NJFP) targeted at reducing the nation’s unemployment problem. This latest attempt adds to the earlier programme, the N-Power Programme, introduced by the Buhari-led government to reduce youth joblessness.

Curated as an initiative between the Federal Government of Nigeria and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the NJFP seeks to link talented graduates with local job opportunities in areas of their speciality. It will also equip them with world-class practical knowledge and relevant skills.

The NJFP design suggests that it will contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and support sectors and industries that are crucial to building the future of Nigeria. Focus areas include start-up economy, innovation, creative industries, digital and technology sector, the green economy, financial services, agriculture, real estate, construction, transportation, among others.

In recent past, different administrations at federal and state levels have implemented various empowerment programmes including the Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment Program (Sure-P), N-Power, YouWin, among others.

Sure P was introduced in 2012 as a platform to reinvest Federal Government’s savings from fuel subsidy on programmes that would have a direct impact on the citizens. The program provided temporary employment opportunities to unemployed and unskilled women and youth. Over 120,000 jobs were created. Sure P was also deployed in the training and placing of midwives and community health extension workers.

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Similar to that is the N-Power programme designed to engage unemployed graduates and to help facilitate social development in the country. Debuted in June 2016, the programme has since engaged thousands of unemployed Nigerians in different batches. Specific programmes such as N-Health and N-Teach are reserved for graduates who must have completed their one-year mandatory NYSC programme, the others such as N-Tech, N-Creative, N-Agro and N-Build are for both graduates and non-graduates alike.

Another empowerment programme is the Youth Enterprise with Innovation in Nigeria (YouWiN!) which was introduced as a large-scale national competition for young entrepreneurs in the country. A collaboration among the Federal Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Communication Technology, Ministry of Youth Development with support from the Department for International Development (DFID) and World Bank.

The gradual rise in joblessness among the youth with all these empowerment programmes calls for critical examination of the empowerment programmes

With successful winners scientifically selected through the help of random assignment research technique, the YouWiN empowerment programme, N-Teach and N-Health beneficiaries of the N-Power programme appear to have passed through proper examinations and screenings than other empowerment programs in the country.

Even with the implementation of past empowerment programmes, Nigeria’s youth unemployment problem is scary and has long been described as a time bomb. In the last unemployment statistics released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), whereas Nigeria’s unemployment rate is 33.3 per cent, the youth unemployment rate is far higher. The unemployment rate for Nigerians aged between 15 and 24 years is 53.4 per cent while for Nigerians aged between 25 and 34 years, the unemployment rate is 37.2 per cent. Among the 23.18 million unemployed Nigerians, the number of the youths 12.72 million representing 55 per cent of the unemployed Nigerians.

The gradual rise in joblessness among the youth with all these empowerment programmes calls for critical examination of the empowerment programmes and it behoves the current federal administration to provide the evaluation of the impacts of the previous and current empowerment programmes before embarking on new ones.

Questions such as: What did the government get right in the previous empowerment programmes? Did Nigeria and Nigerians actually need those programmes at the time of their implementation? How could they have been implemented differently to get better results? What metrics best capture the gains of these programmes? Why must new administrations come up with new empowerment programmes? Instead, why not improve on those already in existence? Without asking these fundamental questions, these and future empowerment programmes may end up becoming conduit pipes for siphoning scarce resources.

If the motive is to facilitate social development and youth employment, it is high time Nigerian governments at federal and state levels started to work with the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) in order to empower micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in the country. This is a viable option because with 41 million MSMEs in the country, if all could create three employment opportunities each, over 100 million jobs would be created for a labour force of about 70 million individuals, according to the latest labour force statistics by NBS. Should the government adopt this idea, its impacts will strongly boost tax payment by companies, VAT, consumption expenditure, just to mention a few.