NiRA empowers the youth with entrepreneurship skills
The Nigeria Internet Registration Association (NiRA) has organized a youth entrepreneurship seminar at Muson Centre in Lagos to stepped up the pace to empower the Nigerian youth who would start up businesses with entrepreneurial skills.
Speaking with Daily Times in an exclusive interview on the essence of the programme at the event, the President of the Nigeria Internet Registration Association, NIRA, Rev. Sunday Folayan, stated that NiRA looked at the number of domains that has been registered per population and realized that country like South Africa with a population of over 55 million have two million registered domains when compared to Nigeria with a population of 170 million having registered only 60,000 domains due to mindset of Nigerians who would ask ‘what will they use them for?.
He stated that the Association came to realize that if they have to capitalize on domain name registration, they also have to capitalize businesses, stressing that the people that will start up businesses the most are young people who are just leaving school, having wonderful and brilliant ideas and so NiRA felt the shortest cut is to organize this type of entrepreneurship seminar to ginger the youth and bring them up to speak.
Commenting on the issue of funding which is a challenge for the youth in Nigeria, the NiRA President said:”Unfortunately its vicious circle and that is why we have decided to break it. There are so many people with money in Nigeria. If you listen to the news recently in domiciliary account of Nigerians there is excess of $20 billion in Nigerian Banks. This is not talking about Naira account, treasury bills that Nigerians have bought. But we cannot develop if we do not capitalize the real sector. In years past many people have invested in businesses and burnt their hands because Nigeria is very hostile to business. Are you going to talk about Discos, security, energy, and up till now we are still queuing for fuel. So there are many things that make it very difficult for businesses to thrive in Nigeria, but we must break the vicious circle.
“Yes there are no funds, we need to create the businesses, and then look for how to get the fund. We will not get funds and be looking for businesses there right now, but if we create the businesses in an enabling environment we will get fund pool as investment in businesses. We will start from somewhere and we will look then at solving the financial issue after we have capitalized the youth to bring about these businesses.”
Rev Folayan explained that NiRA is quasi government, doing its activities on behalf of the government of Nigeria as a private sector led public sector partnership between government and the people.
“Everything NiRA is doing is being done by the government. We are representing the government, doing this on behalf of the government, so by not disturbing us and by enabling us, establishing us, allowing us flourish, government is already benefiting the people. And I would want it to be seen as such as our existence itself is based on what the government has done. We should appreciate government for that. Ours is now to go ahead and vindicate government by doing things better. So everything we are doing we are doing on behalf of government of Nigeria. And we are very grateful for the encouragement we have gotten from the government so far.
“We have come from a stage of acute deprivation, a stage where people don’t even trust the government, where people see the government as the problem and not the solution to their problem. I will say we should take baby steps first in the sense that there is so much to do and we must be careful how we do it, so that we don’t upturn the apple cart. I think government is fantastic in its support for NiRA so far. As we get incremental challenges we interface with government through Nigerian Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) and whatever help and support we need they give us cooperation. I think NiRA is its own limiting factor in accessing help from government. We have enjoyed a very good symbiotic relationship with government of Nigeria.
Other dignitaries at the event include: Mr Muhammed Rudman, Vice President, NiRA, Deacon Chima Onyekwere (OON), Chairman NiRA BOT, Emmanuel Edet of NITDA, Edith Udeagu, COO NiRA, Kemi Adepoju, Head Business Development, NiRA, while speakers include: Pascal Dike, President, Junior Chamber International(JCI),Mr Niyi Yusuf Country Manager Accenture, Opeyemi Awoyemi, Co-Founder Jobberman and WHOGOHOST
