Nigeria: Development sociologist says entrepreneurship can lift millions out of poverty

A development sociologist at the University of Ibadan, Dr Olumuyiwa Omobowale, has said that entrepreneurship can lift million of Nigerians out of poverty. This is especially important as about 70 per cent of Nigerians (about 126 million) live below the poverty line, according to National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).

“One of the ironies of Nigeria is that Nigeria has a huge working population between 15 and 60 years of age but huge chunks of this population are actually jobless. These are well trained Nigerians but they are jobless, which predicts a bleak future for the country,” Omobowale told Entrepreneurship+ in an interview at the weekend.

Skilled people across the world have build businesses that show the potential to lift people out of poverty, but how can this work in Nigeria? “I think there is a need to prioritise vocational education, there’s need to prioritise entrepreneurship. The urge to create wealth and not be a parasite in the centre of wealth, I think there is a need to do that,” Omobowale said.

He said there is the need to help reengineer the young people’s mind on the “creativity and urge to be a creator of wealth – and to do that I think it has to be factored into our curriculum and even University of Ibadan has such programmes across different disciplines – students are expected to take something on entrepreneurship before they graduate.

“There is a need for education – an awareness that first, in Nigeria, there are many jobs out there that people have refused to take on because most people look up to the bureaucracy, white collar jobs. People need to be trained in vocations and you’ve seen examples of some of our students who have first degrees, second degrees who go into vocations such as photography, wedding planning, fashion designing and so on. Some have become mechanics – I’ve seen engineering graduates who even Masters Degree and they own automobile workshops and they’re the ones doing fine.”

In another three years (2020), about 122 million young people in Africa will enter the job market, per data from McKinsey Global Institute. This number is higher than any other region in the world and as the continent has the world’s fastest-growing labour force, with its highest rate of population growth at about 2.5 per cent annually in the last five years, based on data from UN World Population Prospects, this growth rate indicates that African governments need to find ways to create more jobs that are currently lacking on the continent. The answer, some experts say, is in entrepreneurship. This is more pertinent since by 2050, according to the UN, of the 2.4 billion new people on the planet by 2050, 1.3 billion of them would come from Africa.

Although African governments are trying to come up with creative ways to generate jobs, studies have shown that these attempts cater “for a small percentage of the African youth. But, the rest of the job gap will need to be filled from small and medium enterprises,” as the McKinsey Global Institute put it in its 2012 report Africa at work: Job creation and inclusive growth.

As former US President Barack Obama in his 2010 Summit on Entrepreneurship, said: “Entrepreneurship [is vital] because throughout history, the market has been the most powerful force the world has ever known for creating opportunity and lifting people out of poverty.”