Unemployment: ITF seeks to train 30,000 Nigerians in skills acquisition

THE Industrial Training Fund (ITF) has upped ‎the number of Nigerians to participate in its skills acquisition programme from July -November 2018 to 30,000 in a bid to reduce unemployment in the country.

Disclosing this in Jos, the Director General of ITF, Joseph Ari stated that the Fund was set to train thirty thousand Nigerians across the country in eleven vocational skills as a way to equip the youths, women and physically challenge with skills and create jobs and wealth at the same time.

Ari explained that governments all over the world have turned to skills acquisition as the universal currency of the 21st century armed at empowering citizens for employment, wealth generation and growth.

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He further explained that “the skills programmes billed for implementation to include the National Industrial Skills Development Programme, NISDP, the Women Skills Empowerment Programme, WOSEP, Skills Training and Empowerment Programme for the Physically Challenged, STEPC, Air Conditioning and Refrigeration and Designing and Garment Making”

The ITF boss said the programmes which are mostly targeted at the youths, women and the physically challenged were carefully selected based on projected value addiction of to the nation’s economy and individual beneficiaries.

He explained that apart from NISDP that would be implemented in all the states of the Federation and the FCT, the other training programmes would only be implemented in some selected states.

Ari, therefore, called on the states and local governments to collaborate with the Fund for a multiplier effect of the programmes.

He also urged the state governments and other stakeholders to sponsor additional trainees for the programmes, as such collaboration would be required to cover the monthly stipends of the trainees, start-up packs for such additional trainees and offset any allowances for the master-craftsmen that would be retained as a result of the additional trainees.