Nigeria must begin to invest in its young population as Covid-19 provides a reality check for Africa’s largest economy by changing job patterns and upsetting conventional employment.
Panellists at the BusinessDay national conversation on Nigeria’s response to Covid-19, Wednesday, said the country must address skills gap and the content of its education curricula while leveraging technology to boost entrepreneurship.
At a panel session entitled ‘Investing in Nigeria’s Future’, Lucy Newman, an independent director, governance & performance improvement advisor, said Nigeria has a scary unemployment rate not only due to a lack of jobs but also inadequate skills to match the few jobs that are available.
“Until the country is able to address the skills gap, it won’t make headway in tackling unemployment,” she said.
Newman noted that over 24 million jobs would be lost by 2030 while some 130 million would be created, but noted that Nigeria was not preparing its population to match the skills required in the workplace.
“The Covid-19 has given us a wonderful opportunity to see the gains of investing in people, and it should be seen as a wake-up call for all,” she said.
Newman explained that work was changing and indications had shown that employers of labour were cutting down on capacity building for their employees and would prefer those who skilled up themselves as it cuts costs for firms.
The United Nations Population Fund said in a 2017 report that one-third of the Nigerian population was less than 25 years. The UN projects that Nigeria’s demography will hit 440 million by 2050, making it world’s third largest population. Official data show that 55.4 percent of Nigerian youths are unemployed or under-employed. A 2017 Skills Gap Assessment in Nigeria reported that 80.9 percent of employers surveyed for the report noted that skills gap was a major problem among Nigerian employees and had a major impact on their performance, leading to loss of business.
Haruna Jalo-Waziri, CEO, Central Securities Clearing System, while reacting to question around Nigeria’s reduction of statutory transfer of the Universal Basic Transfer in the 2020 budget amid the already dilapidated infrastructure, said the country tended to focus too much on the formal aspect of education ignoring the informal.
“What makes a good education system is the context of what is taught,” he said. “If we don’t look into the country’s academic curriculum, we are wasting our time.”
According to him, the statistics around Nigeria’s education system was horrible both in terms of the output produced as well as out-of-school children.
He noted that the legislation around basic education needed to be looked into, and it should be focused on reality and not around abstract thinking.
On the issue of attracting FDI, Haruna called for funds into sectors with multiplier effects, noting that at present, the pool of funds in Nigeria was on fixed income rather than on infrastructure.
Covid-19 has pushed most jobs online, with many firms finding no need to engage many people. This will fuel unemployment in Nigeria, which is already at a sky-high 23.2 percent. The World Economic Forum said in 2017 that 46 percent of jobs in Nigeria were susceptible to automation.
Debola Williams, CEO, Red Media Africa, said going forward and recovering from the pandemic, entrepreneurs must leverage and effectively utilise technology in their businesses in order to grow.
“We need to pay more attention to technology and human resources to develop, taking cue from China. As a country, Nigeria needs to invest in technology and policy. We need to be more deliberate about creating and utilising opportunities,” Williams said.
“2020 is a year of dismantling stereotypes and birthing new ideas as well as collective action,” he said.
Education and employment will determine the livelihoods of sub-Saharan Africa, according to WEF. But the country has 10.5 million out-of-school children aged between five and 14, according to UNICEF. The majority of Nigeria’s young population prefers white-collar jobs amid high unemployment rate estimated at 23 percent. However, the current situation shows that jobs are becoming scarcer.
Efosa Ojomo, global prosperity research group leader, Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, said that the outbreak of the pandemic had enforced a new normal that called for a reformation in all activities in the economy.
“COVID-19 is unprecedented and has called for reorganisation. It is time to change the paradigm and employ new forms of doing things, it is necessary to leverage technology and engage in innovative activities,” Ojomo said.
Teju Abisoye, acting executive secretary, Lagos State Employment Trust Fund, while noting the importance of SMEs to the growth of the country, said 86 percent of employment was created by businesses in the segment.
She explained that due to the importance of MSMEs in creating jobs, the LETF was providing subsidised funding to businesses to enable them to expand their operations.
According to her, the agency had supported 11,000 SMEs.
Abisoye explained that due to the pandemic, the agency was more focused on protecting employment rather than on trying to create a new one.
“One of the ways we are solving the unemployment issue is by creating funds and supporting businesses that are resilient and warehouse a large number of the population,” she said. “We are also supporting women entrepreneurs as our survey has shown that businesses in that terrain create 6-7 percent of jobs as against the 4 percent created in others.”
Newman, earlier cited, proffered a solution to Nigeria’s skills crisis, recommending crowdsourcing as one of the viable opportunities for people to get skills.
She proposed that employers of labour should earmark 1 percent of their profit before tax (PBT) for building capacity for their employees, while on the other hand, employees should spend 10 percent of their income on building and improving themselves in order to meet the changes in workplace.
She also tasked employers to adopt at least one of the SDG goals as part of their CSR.
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