Youth unemployment and 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 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 search for non-existing white collar jobs after graduation.
There is no denying 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. According to the Bureau of Statistics (BOS), the current youth unemployment in the country is 70 percent. This means that 70 million of youth population out of 100 million is unemployed. The percentage is even more alarming among those with higher educational qualifications. It is fact 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 championed by the BOI.
High youth unemployment has negative effect on the country’s development agenda. For example, it is responsible for terrorism, political unrest, economic instability, drug abuse, human trafficking and kidnapping. Sadly, unemployed youth lose their self-esteem and this is known to have negative effect on their families and the overall national productivity and contribution to Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Moreover, jobless graduates are always feeling insignificant and believe they are ostracised from the rest of the society and more so 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, tells us that something needed to be done urgently to address the scourge of youth unemployment in Nigeria. As a government agency, we also call on 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 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.
However, graduate unemployment demands more pragmatic actions from both governments and the private sector. However, it falls on all tiers of government to initiate such work-friendly policies that would encourage the private sector to buy into the programme. They should do this through tax reduction for businesses that undertake the training of unemployed graduates. By so doing, the government would have helped solve the scourge of unemployment and poverty among the youth