In a bid to tackle the perennial problem of youth unemployment in Nigeria, Poise Graduate Finishing Academy (a subsidiary of Nigeria’s foremost etiquette institute, Poise Nigeria) and renowned global development organization, Oxfam Novib, have teamed up to advance a flagship Employability Skills Training program, Career Kickstart. This is a welcome development in the light of Africa’s stark reality of unemployment.
With over 200 million people aged between 15 and 24, Africa has the largest youth population in the world. Sadly, this same population of vibrant youth constitute up to 60 percent of Africa’s jobless. Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, and incidentally the most populous black nation, feels this scourge deeper than most. According to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), by the third quarter of 2018, over 20 million young Nigerians lacked employment. These debilitating figures notwithstanding, efforts of key stakeholders to understand the challenge of unemployment have produced some measure of insights.
According to the Project Lead, Asher Adeniyi, it is clear, for instance, that two major issues stand out among the myriad factors responsible for the scourge. The first issue is, there are no enough jobs as population growth in Africa far outpaces job creation by a huge margin. The second issue is, the majority of youths are not adequately skilled to competently take up the available opportunities. A lot of youths are simply unemployable, their formal education regardless. Asher says that this second issue of skill-gap undergirds the strategy of PGFA and OXFAM through Career Kickstart.
Career Kickstart, primarily targeted at young and aspiring executives, presents a three-week period of intensive training, during which the executives are exposed to skills essential to securing and retaining gainful employment within the highly competitive labour market. These skills include ICT Skills, communication, Creative thinking, interview & CV writing skills, problem-solving skills, innovation and creativity, business writing and selling-to- win techniques. The three-week long training is then capped with an exclusive Job Fair and an Entrepreneurship Seminar where the participants are brought in contact with prospective employers. It is interesting to note that the employment rate of Career Kickstart participants is well over 80 percent, according to reports from PGFA.
Partnerships of this nature are fundamental in tackling not only the menace of unemployment but also the challenge of global development. The UN recognizes this and identifies the place of partnership as Goal 17 in the Sustainable Development Goals. PGFA and OXFAM Novib, through Career Kickstart, are taking the lead in this space, contributing their quota in alleviating unemployment and giving the young population a higher chance of getting employed, or better still, creating their own jobs.
