Skills-based businesses are becoming really big business in Nigeria. They have always been so in other parts of the world. But there’s an incipient awakening to its potentials in Nigeria by players in the skills and crafts sector. One of them, the super-charged Bright Jaja, CEO of iCreate Africa Skills Festival, believes that if properly groomed and harnessed the industry has the potential of delivering 5million jobs to the Nigerian job market in 5years.
Sounds like an exaggeration until you do the math. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, NBS, as of Q3 2018, 55.4% of young people (15-34) were either underemployed or unemployed (doing nothing). And according to Worldometers, a site on that handles world statistics, Nigeria currently has 202,939,558 as of 18/11/19; the number of working-age people (15 – 64) being 110,850,171 or 53.77% of the general population. It’s a big window for skills to fill in the gaps left by unemployment of the many able and capable young men and women.
The iCreate Skills Festival, which had its debut last year is again gathering steam this year and heading towards the grand finale to hold in Lagos in December. At the press conference where Jaja made what some would consider an audacious claim, and in company of his corporate sponsors – Sterling Bank, Bosch and other players in the sector, he pressed the point that “one of the problems we have in Nigeria is that a lot of young people are going for jobs that are not available. The system, the entire system, is focused on educating young people for jobs that are not available”.
This was reinforced by Monalisa Onojo, a winner from the first edition of the skills festival who said “there are no jobs out there and that is when we realise that it’s time to pick up a skill, it is time to learn something, to be an employer of labour instead of being an employee”.
While it might not transit as smoothly as she renders it, in the skills sector, generally categorized alongside the informal sector, capital requirement is nowhere near as high as what the formal sector setups require. It’s a sector that runs more on passion and guts and where bootstrapping tends to be the way to making it. The stories are many of those who started out with close to nothing. However, not many are then able to up their game and scale up such that they end up employing.
The Skills Festival teaches participants how to employ the modern ways of doing business such that scale-up is achievable. iCreate, with its well-adapted vocational education curriculum, is seeing to it that participants get if you like, executive vocational education that sets them up and ready for the marketplace.
There were quite a number of eye-opening revelations at the regional levels in Enugu and Kaduna, in skill areas such as building & Construction, ICT, Creative Arts and Fashion, Culinary, Agriculture, Hospitality, Social Services, etc. The fireworks promise to be fully lit at the grand finale
Morounfolu Fasinro, Chief Client Engagement Officer for Sterling Bank says his bank is “very happy to partner with iCreate Africa to produce this sort of opportunities and for people to create and change these industries for the future”.
We believe, here at CSI, that this is the kind of project that needs buy-in from more public and private institutions. Its success and those of others like it would help considerably to defuse the social tension that unemployment generates
