Less than one per cent of the unemployed youth population in Nigeria has benefited from the government’s social safety net, a report by Jobberman has said
The online platform, in its 2022 report, alluded to the limited coverage and weak targeting of social interventions, among others may have denied a larger percentage of access.
Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Jobberman, Oreoluwa Boboye, said this during an unemployment roundtable discussion organised by the firm in partnership with the MasterCard Foundation.
He said it is time for youths to shift their priority away from white-collar jobs and develop side hustle to their main job.
He said: “When you hear about a job, what readily comes to mind is a white-collar job, a feeling of working in the office and being entitled to perks and others. Over time, this dictates what is termed as gainful employment and because people are not finding their desired opportunity in the white-collar space, they tend to tag themselves as unemployed.
“But the job is actually beyond white collar job. A lot of youths are engaged in the informal sector with one kind of hustle or another. They usually call this survival, but it is in the actual sense not survival because they are making money from it.
“Like every successful and established entrepreneur, they must wake up to focus and develop that side hustle or survival to the main hustle. This is the way to go because considering Nigeria’s growing population, there will always be job demand and supplier mismatch.”
Boboye further advised on values reorientation, calling for a projection of success stories in the informal sector as a way of motivating players.
In her submission, the CEO of The Africa Talent Company (parent company of Jobberman), Hilda Kragha, stressed the need for youths to develop and repackage their side hustle as a means of livelihood.
She maintained that the society must encourage the youths by ascribing values and importance to the informal jobs they do.
“Society needs to appreciate the brave ones who have set out on their own to make a living.
They should not be underpriced or underpaid as this could be discouraging. They need to be rewarded and appreciated,” she said.
On his part, Managing Director of Sterling Bank Limited, Abubakar Suleiman, in his keynote address, wants the youths to rely less on the government for jobs and start thinking out of the norm.
To him, the government is not set up to create jobs but to enable job creation.
“We must set out to create jobs and ensure the government provides the necessary support. We need the government to be less obstructive, to be out of the way and create an environment for young people to attempt to create businesses because they have the capacity,” he stated.
On possible economic areas youths can explore for job creation, Suleiman added: “We have a better chance to create jobs in agriculture, food processing, construction and real estate than we do in providing jobs in banking. The truth is we must re-tune our educational system to focus where the opportunity exists and create these jobs.”
Source; guardian.ng