Taming unemployment through Graduate Entrepreneurship

Recently, the Bank of Industry (BOI) set aside N2billion Graduate Entrepreneurship Fund (GEF) for graduates in need of securing loan facility for their businesses. The scheme which is being implemented in conjunction with the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC), will identify the innate talents of young graduates to enable them build capacities for self-reliance and create jobs for themselves and others. Definitely, this is a welcome initiative, especially when it is meant to inculcate the culture of self-reliance in our youths and wean them from the perpetual false hope of searching for non-existing white collar jobs immediately after graduation.
It is fact that Nigeria has one of the highest youth unemployment in the world and the figure continues to rise with no appreciable efforts by all tiers of governments and other stakeholders to ameliorate the situation. Available figures from the Bureau of Statistics (BOI) put the current youth unemployment at over 60 percent. This means that 60 million of youth population out of 100 million is unemployed. The percentage is even more alarming among those with higher educational qualifications. It is estimated that more than two million graduates enter the labour market every year with extremely limited opportunities for job. Given this dire statistics, it is imperative that the authorities make youth employment a priority through measures like the one being advanced by BOI.
High youth unemployment has negative effect on the country’s development agenda. It also responsible for terrorism, political unrest, economic instability, drug abuse, human trafficking and kidnapping. Sadly, unemployed youth lose their self-esteem and this has an adverse negative effect on their families and the overall national productivity and contribution to the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Moreover, graduates with no jobs are always feeling insignificant and believe that they are ostracised from the rest of the society, and most often, are regarded as parasites by other people.
If government needed to know the gravity of the nation’s graduate unemployment, the trampling of job seekers to death during stampedes at the last Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) recruitment drive across the country, presents a graphic picture of the problem. That incident, alone tells us that something needs to be done urgently to address the scourge of unemployment in the country. As a government agency, we urge the BOI to liaise with some private sector organisations in the training of unemployed graduates for skill acquisition.
This they can do through taking responsibility for the payment of their stipends while the training lasts. We are advocating this because a large percentage of the graduates do not have the financial wherewithal to sponsor themselves through skill acquisition programmes, especially those lacking the capacity to venture into businesses requiring technical and professional skills. This is why we are commending the NYSC Skill Acquisition and Entrepreneurship Development (SAED) Department, including the BOI partner Entrepreneurship Development Centres across the six geopolitical zones for their efforts in developing the capacity of NYSC members by de-risking them and making available business loans after completion of their programme.
The problem of graduate unemployment requires more pragmatic actions from the government and the private sectors. However, it is the responsibility of the government to initiate such work-friendly policies that would encourage the private sector to buy into the programme. They should do this by reducing taxes for those businesses that undertake the training of unemployed graduates. That way, the government would have helped solve the scourge of unemployment and poverty among the youth