Nigeria is confronted with an unemployment crisis, resulting from the country’s failure to attract sufficient investments and create jobs for its teeming population that is expanding at an average annual rate of 2.6 per cent.
At 23 per cent, Nigeria has one of the highest unemployment rates in Africa with its youthful population—those within the ages of 1534—accounting for a larger chunk of the figure.
However, aside the failure of attracting the needed investment to cater for its burgeoning population, which is growing faster than its economy, the country is faced with a failing educational system that lacks the needed infrastructure that has made disparities between the skills acquired by students in the universities and the actual skills needed in the labour market to widen
Year in year out, Nigeria churns out millions of graduates who lack the prerequisite skills needed to get good placement and this has led to gross inadequacies in the supply of requisite skills needed by employers in the labour market, making Nigerian graduates unemployable.
Burdened by the zeal to change this narrative, Hilda Kabushenga-kragha, CEO of Jobberman, birthed a youth engagement team empowered to provide employability and soft skills training across multiple states in the country for youths.
The team also conducts campus outreach programs including career fairs, case competitions and so much more.
This is in line with the belief that her firm has a key role to play in seeing young Nigerians get their dream jobs through the over two million job seekers that access the platform.
For her, most public universities in Nigeria do not offer after school career services hence, by filling this gap, young Nigerians would have the guidance they need as they think about their careers and will eventually graduate better prepared for work than previous generations in recent times.
At various times, KabushengaKragh has come up with various programs to reward job seekers in terms of material needs. To commemorate its 10th anniversary, the firm in partnership with the Lagos State Employment Trust Fund (LSETF), embarked on a corporate social responsibility project to give back to the community.
The event, which the firm tagged “shop for free”, gave participants the opportunity to shop official clothing items at no cost.
It also provided free employability skills training set up to provide job seekers with CV writing tips and interview best practices.
Under her watch as chief executive officer, the company has evolved beyond the traditional placements of employees to leveraging more on technology to develop data-driven solutions that will up-skill job seekers and make them compete globally.
The firm has also developed strong value propositions for mass recruitment including a “talent search” product, which comes with the opportunity for employers to search through the firm’s database of candidates directly and hire at their own pace.
According to KabushengaKragh, the firm is building a solid foundation for growth in 2020 with significant product and customer experience changes coming into play.
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The journey to Jobberman
Hilda Kabushenga-kragha was appointed chief executive officer of Jobberman on the 10th of June 2019, following the exit of Ayodeji Adewunmi, one of the firm’s cofounders.
Before taking up the role at Jobberman, Kabushenga-kragha had years of experience working with several top organisation including the Central Bank of Uganda and global auditing firm, KPMG, where she showed prowess in human capacity development.
After working for over 2years with KPMG East Africa, she decided to enrol at the IESE Business School, University of Navarra
For her, she wanted a bigger platform for impact and despite the exposure KPMG gave; she had the mind- set of being at the global stage, where she can widen her impact.
While developing her knowledge in the business school, Hilda remained with KPMG in a consulting role.
In 2015, she was employed by Mckenzie and offered an opportunity to pick any of the firm’s three offices in Africa where she would like to work.
She chose the Nigerian office so as to feel some adventure since according to her, she had been to East and South Africa, and knew those regions quite well.
Bridging Nigeria’s skills gap
Many Nigerian higher institutions are yet to incorporate in their curriculum the necessary skills that are in high demand by the labour market. Most courses are taught theoretically, she notes, with schools ignoring the practicality and application of what is being taught. This makes the average graduate not fit for the realistic demands of the labour market, hence leading to poor labour performance.
Since coming into Jobberman, Kabushenga Kragha has been singled amongst many, as a leading voice in seeing that Nigeria’s skills gap is corrected.
Whether it is through conferences the firm organises to strengthen the relationship between employers and employees in an organisation, she has on several occasions proffered solutions to various ways in solving the skills gap.
When Businessday reached out to Hilda, on possible ways to solving youth unemployment which analysts say if not checked, could explode when the country hits the 400 million population mark by 2050, she noted that for youth to have access to dignified work, three things have to go hand in hand.
First is access to good and relevant training both at the formative level and higher education. She noted that a lot of work has to be done to develop curricula relevant to today’s workplace and more importantly the workplace of the future.
At the same time, Nigeria needs to increase access to higher and/or vocational education. According to her, only 30 per cent of youth who sign up for the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) exams, eventually make it into university. Therefore, Nigeria needs to drastically increase access to good higher education otherwise it risks cutting off hope for more young people.
The second factor she explained is the democratic access to work. She added that in most places, whether or not a person gets a job depends on who the person knows or some other factor which puts the person in a position of privilege.
“Over 50 per cent of people applying for/securing jobs across Africa today are objectively not the right people for the role and this is a big hindrance to workplace productivity. By democratising access to work and giving every qualified person a shot at every job application, you begin to get the right person in the right job and company’s productivity soar,” she said.
The third factor is strong public and private sector markets, which can absorb the young population as they enter the workforce. This according to her includes doubling down on providing training and access to markets for young entrepreneurs because today’s structures cannot absorb every unemployed youth into work. She noted that some young people have a knack for entrepreneurship and they are best supported on that path.
She also added that the government is putting in place initiatives that directly and indirectly support this, for example, mandating banks to lend to Small and Medium-scale Enterprises (SMES) which enables them to grow and employ more people.
“I believe, however, that a lot of work has to be done to redefine ‘work’ in the mindsets of all relevant stakeholders. We need to make bold moves to dignify and professionalise blue-collar work, not everybody is called to be a doctor or lawyer and in fact, the bulk of the jobs are typically in blue-collar,” Kabushenga-kragh told Businessday.
She further explained that Nigeria needs to establish clear standards and career paths for plumbers and mechanics and nannies and all the other valuable work which goes unrecognised in society and let young children know that growing up to be an electrician is dignified work well worth one’s time and education.
Fortunately, these factors can be enhanced through technology.
On the training side, she says Nigeria can leapfrog the higher education challenge by encouraging good online education which can instantly provide access to millions as there is no need for physical space. “Companies like softcom with their Koyar platform and the EDC which provides training for entrepreneurs show that we can make progress at scale on this front,” she said.
On access to jobs, she explained that her firm is leveraging technology to ensure that each job seeker has access to as many available jobs as possible and also, helping to deploy relevant competencybased tests to ensure that each job opening is filled by the best match possible.
“Our platform uses a combination of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Human Resource (HR) experts to sieve through hundreds and sometimes thousands of applications and provide companies and recruiters with the best possible match for their opening based on objective metrics. Doing this at scale would see workplace productivity grow in leaps and bounds,” she said.
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