Unemployment: ITF trains 500,000 Nigerians in skills acquisition in 6 years

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2 years ago

The Industrial Training Fund (ITF) has disclosed that over 500,000 Nigerians has been trained in different skilled trade over the past six (6) years in a bid to tackle unemployment in the country.

Speaking while receiving a delegation from Leadership Media Group Limited, the Director-General of the ITF, Sir Joseph Ari said under the renewed vision of the agency, the focus of the Fund is centred around a national apprenticeship training system.

Ari explained that the “Fund is constantly reviewing its programmes to enable more Nigerians to embrace skills acquisition.

“By 2050, we are meant to be the third most populous nation in the world with about 400 or 500 million people and that is just in few years.

“Imagine what it would be like if you have unskilled population skills for so many crises, the issue of restiveness, prostitution, armed robbery and so on will be a daily event.

“The good thing about Nigeria is that our population is made up of the youth. Many nations of the world are aged in population but we have a young vibrant population. About 60% of our population consists of the youth and so if we have a skilled population, we can even export skills.

“Skills have come to be known as the currency of the 21st century. So, what we have done in terms of the apprenticeship is we’ve been able to bring up trade areas that are interventionist in nature.

“Last year, we have 35 of them from plumbing and fabrication, pipe fitting, oil and gas to POP. We even have programmes designed for the women folk known as Women’s Skills Empowerment Programme, WOSEP, and even the ones for the physically challenged.

“If you take one of the intervention programmes, for example, the National Industrial Skills Development Programme, if you take 300 persons per state multiplied by 37 states including the FCT, we have about 11,100 to be trained in one trade area.”

“In 6 years, the ITF has trained over 500,000 Nigerians with the requisite skills to key into the federal government’s job and wealth creation policy direction under the National Development Plan” he stated.

Ari noted that “we have also made in submission to government that there are four areas we need to pay attention to, and these came about as a result of the survey we carried out with the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation.

“We carried out a skills gap survey, we wanted to know what are the gaps that exist so we bring in our huge population to fill into those.

“We came up with four critical areas. These are construction, agriculture, the services industry and ICT. The services industry for example is very huge in value chain. And we said with this development, you can fill in the gaps that exist ” the DG explained.

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