By Chinasaokwu Helen Okoro
The World Bank in collaboration with the Federal Ministry of Education on Monday expressed readiness to spend 10 million dollars for Nigerian youths to acquire the critical skills needed for employment.The World Bank Education Specialist, Dr Mistura Rufai,, made this known at a two-day workshop for grantees of the Innovation Grant Facility in Abuja on Monday.The workshop was organised by the Innovation Development and Effectiveness in the Acquisition of Skills project of the Federal Ministry of Education.Rufai said the country needed youths to be empowered and trained in building its economic fortunes, adding that the current scheme had about 78 grantees to empower over 50,000 youths across the country.She said, “This facility was designed to support complementing agencies that are promoting innovations in the training of digital skills.“It aims at supporting critical intervention projects in the skills development ecosystem such that we develop digital skills across the country.“The training is expected to have beginners, intermediate to advanced level. As we speak at the national level, we have about 10,000 youths currently being trained.She noted that they have about 78 grantees and hopes that in about a year, they will have over 50,000 grantees being trained.“This project has several components and the innovation ground is just a component covering about 10 million dollars.The selection process is very competitive and we start the process of asking potential trainees to submit expressions of interest, when this is done, we evaluate and ask them to submit a proposal and then we bring in both the private sector, experts in the field to access those proposals and then the potential grantees are ranked based on their proposals,” she added.On her part, the National Project Coordinator, IDEAS, Blessing Ogwu, said the programme was created to give every Nigerian child the opportunity to learn and acquire skills.Ogwu said that with the increasing number of out-of-school children in the country, there was a need to remove them from the street. She charged the grantees to be committed to the initiative to reduce the number of unemployed youths in the country.“The essence of this project is focusing on the skill acquisition to reduce unemployment in Nigeria. We don’t need anyone to tell us that we have so many youths who are unemployed.“Most of our youths are unemployed and the only way is for the youth to acquire our skills,” she said.Also, the IGF Consultant, Prof. Ndem Ayara, explained that the project, scheduled to be implemented within one year, was a Public/Private Partnership arrangement.In the partnership, the public sector will support the consortium to implement the project up to 80 per cent, the private sector partner will provide 20 per cent.“Of the 20 per cent by the private sector, they will contribute 10 per cent in kind and the other 10 per cent in cash.“It is the cash component of the private sector contribution that is expected to be the counterpart funding by the private sector,” Ayara said.
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