The Oyo state government is set to partner a multinational youth entrepreneurship group, G20 Youths Entrepreneur Alliance (YEA) with a view to enhancing employment opportunities for the youths of the state.
The Director General, Citizens Enterprises, Mr. Jean-Louis Gregoire, who led the Youths Entrepreneur Alliance members on a courtesy call on state governor, Senator Abiola Ajimobi said the group was intent on fostering youth empowerment schemes to reduce poverty among the youths.
“Our objective is to look into how to set up the mechanism that will provide mass employment opportunities through entrepreneurial-driven schemes. We would take from the pool of young undergraduates in the universities to benefit from the scheme and they would be empowered through entrepreneurial education, easy access to start up funds for small scale businesses,” Gregoire said.”
Gregoire said the empowerment scheme would be what he called ‘top-down microeconomic scheme’ which he believed would bring about 85 percent job creation.
Gregoire pointed out that focus of the empowerment scheme would be on female youths, whom he noted played prominent roles in family building.
“This top-down microeconomic scheme will lead to the creation of 85 percent jobs in the first quarter of the starting year and our major focus would be the female-youths that will give multiplier effects to the society. We so much appreciate the gesture of Oyo State government for bringing forth so many programmes to help the youths overcome poverty and be self-sustaining.”
In his remarks, Ajimobi said his government remained committed to alleviating poverty occasioned by unemployment in the state.
He noted that youths will continue to be trained and provided with materials needed for them to set up businesses.
Ajimobi said the state agricultural empowerment scheme, named ‘Agric-Oyo’ was also set up for economic diversification with the youths of the state expected to be major beneficiaries.
“Oyo State is strategically positioned to gain from Youths Entrepreneur Alliance as we have the population that can better benefit from the scheme. In terms of economic diversification, Oyo State would reap so much gain as it has the largest landmass targeted at large scale agriculture.”
“We are not in want of programmes and at the same time, we are in need of more. We want to encourage and teach our youths how to fish rather than give them fish, we pledge our support for this programme as we can see clearly, it will benefit our youths and the society at large,” Ajimobi said.
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