Mrs. Mary Dan-Abia is the Director, Skill Acquisition and Entrepreneurship Development (SAED) of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC). In this interview with NEDUM NOBLE, she x-rayed the genesis of the skill acquisition and entrepreneurship development programme, its noble objectives and achievements and the challenges it is facing, among others. Excerpt:
Mrs. Mary Dan-Abia
The NYSC was over the decades established to address the unity of the nation. Could you please, tell what brought about the creation of the Skills Acquisition and enterpreneurship development?
Initially, the NYSC focused on unity and integration, but as time went on, it became imperative we needed to address other objectives of establishing the scheme and one of them is the 7th that seeks to inculcate the spirit of self reliance in our young graduates.
And when we started, it was very rosy. I recall that before you are through with the NYSC, you already had two to three job offers. But along the line, it was not so with the trend of things in the country as lots of corps members have completed their one year mandatory service to the nation without any job.
The issue of unemployment became more glaring. As a dynamic institution, the NYSC became worried with the ugly trend and decided to address the issue. Since our mandate is to inculcate the spirit of self reliance in our young people, we started up with what we call cooperative ventures where we got some grants for some corps members and it paid off for those who did it successfully.
We also started collaborating with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to training our corps members in developing feasibility studies and business plans. Even with the National Directorate of Employment ( NDE), we worked with them to see how they can start up business of their own. But starting a business is not a tea party. We needed some rudiments. We also brought in some people that introduced certain vocational skills. We then created a department of Skill Acquisition and Entrepreneurial Development (SAED).
Just before the establishment, there was an attempt to change the concept of our orientation course. In an attempt to review the programme, we realised that we needed to bring in the SAED into the camp. But with the establishment of the department, getting the corps members to acquire skills and become entrepreneurs became very important and a driving force. That was how we came about in a bid to address the unemployment issue.
How has the NYSC been able to train corps members on entrepreneurship development?
We looked at it this way that the young ones are just coming out of the university. As we all know, when you are graduating, your focus is on getting a job, but because getting those jobs are not easy as such, we, during the orientation programme in camp first of all, try to sensitise them and change their mindset from looking for jobs to creating jobs. It takes us time to do that.
During their orientation programme, we bring out about 30 hours, 3 hours of 10 days to get them through this and we start with the sensitization. We get people to talk to them on the need to change their minds from looking for jobs and the needs to become entrepreneurs. We also expose them to entrepreneurship development. We get resource persons who would talk with them in three days and introduce them to entrepreneurship. These resource persons will take them through the course content during which they learn how to start business on their own, and how to manage it, and how to also develop business proposals.
We also introduce them to different skills, and we expect them to choose one of their choices and then they have five days hands-on training.
It is then they are expected to practice on their own during their primary assignment and for those who couldn’t complete the training, it is expected that they would go through the training during their primary assignment.
Please can you mention some of the achievements, challenges and lessons learnt during implementation?
In November 2011, we got an approval from the head of service to establish some more departments for the NYSC one of which was the skills acquisition and entrepreneurship development department, and then, precisely on the 29th of March 2012, this department was inaugurated with the appointment of a director.
And since then, the department had taken off brand as new as it was, and we came out with our vision and mission statements, objectives and goals as well.
As at the end of 2013, we have been able to train over 410, 000 corps members on skills acquisition and entrepreneurship, if I add the 2015 batch A, we will be looking at over 500, 000 corps members who have been exposed to the message of acquiring skills and becoming entrepreneurs.
We went into broad collaboration with international and national organizations to assist us to set up the department and get it running as it is, and the partnership and collaboration has yielded tremendous results. It is through them that we developed the curriculum that we use in the camps for training.
At the commencement of the entrepreneurship development training programme in the camp, every corps member is given a work book so that as the training is ongoing, and they are completing it at the end of the course they would have attempted to develop a business proposal which is also marked by the resource person to try to show them their gaps and difficulties and work through them.
We have been able to collaborate to a large extent with a lot of organizations; in fact it is those organizations that send their resource persons to the camp to train the corps members because the NYSC do not have trainers, and so we rely on the trainers from partnering organizations.
The International Labor Organization (ILO) has been very good, and very supportive to the NYSC in this collaboration as well as other voluntary organization.
The CBN has partnered with NYSC to train corps members on the development of business plans and eventually give a few of them some funds to start up their businesses between 150 and 250 thousand naira, and we were able to sign a memorandum of understanding with the Bank of Industry (BoI) in 2014 for funding option for the corps members because after training them and they develop business plans, the next thing is to source for funds to start. And we needed to link them up with financial institutions and we also have collaboration with Bank of Agriculture.
We have been able to acquire some equipment for the training during the orientation, in fact the first donation of the public address system for the different skill groups was by the former Special Adviser to the President on youths and student matters because we had problems with large classes and one person talking to a class of 500 to 2000 without a public address system.
Our classes are usually broken into groups such as the ICT, cosmetology .We have been able to also acquire some training equipment for hair making, baking, sewing machines, hair dryers and so on. For us to have been able to train the corps members and come out with entrepreneurs, I can tell you that we now have 1,600 corps members who have become entrepreneurs till date. That’s part of our achievement.
Now, we have to an extent removed the fear of finishing service and waiting for a job. Now, while they are waiting for a job, they could use their hands and skills acquired to earn some little money.
How does the NYSC support the corps members who desire to establish their own businesses with a startup capital?
You know NYSC has no money. If it is to give them money, we don’t have to give them, but what we try to do is train and get them to do good business proposals and we link them up to the funding institutions like the CBN which is actually doing something.
The BoI and Bank of Agriculture are also there, and there are some other organizations that are willing to sponsor them, and so once they are done with their business proposal, they send it for approval. Most times, what we do to encourage them is that right from camp during the introduction/training programme, we have a business plan writing competition and that usually spurs them up, and from their training, they begin to develop their business proposal.
Like here now, we have some that we have sent to the BoI, while we hope that they will respond. In BoI, they realise that most people who submit proposals to them don’t meet their standards; so they have now commissioned about 120 business development service providers nationwide. And what we do now is that when they submit, we take the proposals to those service providers to look at them and try to make those proposals get to standard before we submit to bank of industry.
For Bank of Industry, I might not tell you the exact number, but they have been sponsoring some of them. Some of the micro finance institutions have also been able to sponsor. But the interest rates in the commercial banks have been quite high, and so we have not been able to get our corps members to benefit from those ones. Some of them have come, but when you look at the interest rates and looking at these young people, it’s very high, and so we always go to the bank of Industry because they have what is called the state matching funds that insist that if you are from a particular state, if you apply under the matching form, you pay an interest rate of nine percent with three to six months monitorium ladum which will liquidate within three years.
There are some micro finance banks that have flexible repayment plans and so we have linked them to these banks. Our major problem is getting them to develop business proposals that can access those funds. We also went to Sure-P and YouWin where we have introduced them and that was towards the end of last year.
Early this year, we had two or three of them who won from YouWin the sum of 10 million naira each to start their business, and there are quite a number of them who got little monies in different states to take off their busineses. There are micro finance banks that assist these corps members to get funds, but it has not been easy for them either. Our focus now is to get them to develop good business plans.
Do you have any form of mentorship? For instance, having a corps member who has excelled and gotten established to come back and train the corps members?.
In fact they are so many. What we do actually is that we bring those corps members to talk to them in camp. So when they talk to them, they are the ones that do guide them. With this, peer issue comes in, I am sure they feel much better with their peers and they understand them better. What we do is bring the successful ones to talk to them about business and we get some of them to do the hands-on training. Some of them already have centers where they train, so they are linked up.
Considering the fact that most agencies of government are addressing youth unemployment through entrepreneurship training, what is the relevance of NYSC SAED?
For instance, if I talk about NDE that is into addressing that issue, NDE specifically deals with unschooled youth while NYSC deals with schooled youths. If we are able to get one schooled youth empowered, others can be empowered because there is tendency for them to use the unschooled ones. That is where our relevance comes in. These are graduates, and so they have potentials if properly unlocked, will expand. That’s the advantage we have over other agencies. If there are more graduates who are into giving skills to others, then it will be better. What we have with the NDE are the artisans. They train the artisans or they get the artisans already trained to train the unschooled ones.
The NYSC houses the graduate youths who have a lot of potentials in them. They are also very creative. I tell you, if you teach a corps member the rudiments of producing cakes, he gets into the internet and make better cakes.
Sometime ago, I was in Lagos for an entrepreneurship week during the entrepreneurship competition. We sat down for a period of about four hours and saw how they played with cakes. Cakes now have different names which is different from what we have always known.
We also saw them, within the space of four hours produced their shoes to match their bags and their clothes. They sat there and made their dresses, some others made shoes to match the dress; some others produce the jewelries to match their dresses as well as make ups where they had a model.
These achievements were made just between their training in the camp and when they are almost through with their service year. That’s the advantage we have over the others.
Again, NYSC is a structured organization. If you are giving corps members the opportunity to learn skills and become entrepreneurs, you should have a structure.
The way we train them, we just don’t push people to go and collect money and say it is empowerment. The NYSC is not asking for money into the scheme, we just ask that the money is kept so that when the corps members are sent to them, they are empowered, mentored and the corps members are gotten to become entrepreneurs.
It is different from what others are doing where they want to empower youths and all they do is just buy equipment, motorcycles and then people just bring in people and give them motorcycles, that’s not what the NYSC does.
We train you on how to make money out of that motorcycle that they have been given. When we bring out a corps member and call him or her an entrepreneur, it is all embracing. He should be able to handle the skills he has acquired, manage it, do business with it and excel.
Does NYSC receive any form of support/sponsorship from government and non-governmental organizations?
I don’t think so. But I know that some organizations we have collaborated with have sponsored staff for training. For instance, I had to go for training on monitoring and evaluation sponsored by International Labor Organization. They have done that for about five of us, but for the corps members, various organizations have.
Last Saturday, for instance, the young CEO’s business summit sponsored 10 corps members in their forum and that is a forum for people who are starting business. So it was like giving them the wherewithal to manage their business, so we do have. But the challenge is that, it is not coming as we should expect.
We expect the Federal Government to begin to sponsor this programme. You know, if they are able to do that for the thousands of youths that come out through the NYSC we would achieve a lot.
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