Skills Acquisition: NYSC trains 2m youths in 4 years

The National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) says it has trained more than two million youths in four years under its Skills Acquisition and Entrepreneurship Development (SAED) Programme.

Mr Abdulrazak Salawu, the NYSC FCT Coordinator, said this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja on Friday.

He said this achievement was made possible because of NYSC’s commitment to supporting the Federal Government in addressing youth unemployment in the country.
Salawu, however, called on the Federal Government, private sector and well-meaning Nigerians to support the scheme to enable the country achieve sustainable growth through youth empowerment.

According to him, the scheme needs more training materials to adequately train the large number of corps members, noting that most of the materials being used were borrowed by the corps.

Salawu said that with the large number of youths mobilised annually for national service nationwide, the corps was being faced with the challenge of providing materials for them to acquire skills in their chosen fields.

He said if the issue was not urgently addressed, it would affect the level of progress corps members were making in learning; as well as perfecting the skills they were being taught.

“To address the problem of unemployment in the country, the NYSC introduced the Skills Acquisition and Entrepreneurship development (SAED) programme.

“This programme handled by the SAED Department of the NYSC brings together professionals in various fields to train corps members so that they can learn to be self reliant.

“We train them in skills such as; food processing, education, film and photography, construction and automobile.

“Other areas are: power and energy, environment, horticulture and landscaping, cosmetology, aggro-allied, ICT, culture and tourism.
“In the fashion designing class we have over 300 corps members and they are using only three sewing machines; you can imagine how in-effective such training will be.

“We train them in these skills so that they do not need to go looking for white collar jobs; but become self employed and employers of labour.

“However, in spite of these challenges, SAED has been able to train more than two million youths in the last four years.

“For any organisation to achieve that in the face of such challenges; that organisation is a force to be reckoned with in national development.

“Government is already investing a lot of resources on corps members through the scheme, but we need to do more as there is no investment any country makes on its youths that is a waste,” Salawu said.

According to him, unemployment rate increases every year because there are more graduates coming out and Nigeria with its large population is finding it difficult to provide jobs for all, hence the need for equipping them to be self reliant.

He called for collective efforts in replicating what Asian countries did in the area of youth empowerment which had aided them in attaining their level of development.

NAN reports that the SAED programme for corps members commences immediately corps members begin the orientation course at the NYSC camps nationwide.

During orientation, corps members are introduced to the various skill areas where they pick an area of interest with a professional to guide, train and teach them the skills required to succeed.

After the orientation course, the professionals continue with the training for the next six months of the service year allowing corps members to perfect the skills learned.

Financial institutions such as the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Bank of Industry (BoI), Bank of Agriculture and Heritage bank give corps members loan to start up their businesses.

2,702 were registered and are currently undergoing orientation for the Batch ‘A’ Stream I service year in the FCT.