Videos

Nigerian Youth Entrepreneurship Development

3PSMARS Analytics

People's Parliament

News

Press Releases

Interviews

World

Government

Africa

Economy

United Nations

Development

Public Adminsitration

SDGs

Health

Business

Education

Security

Civil Service

Equal Rights

Wealth

Africa Debates

Start up

Resources

The MDGs 2010 Report is a Nigeria-specific analysis of the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals.

Nigerian Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) Report, 2010

When Education and African Entrepreneurs Intersect – 4th  Industrial Revolution Lies at the Intersection of Education and Entrepreneurship in Africa – Njideka Harry

When Education and African Entrepreneurs Intersect

Nigeria Country Report

What is the nature of the youth strategy required to harness the youth in Nigeria? What is to be done is clear: We need youth development programmes and value proposition, as well as an execution framework, around which a paradigmatic value reorientation and platforms of engagement can be achieved

Tunji Olaopa: Taking youth development to the next level

Social analysts note that some dissenting voices greeted the decision of President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration to remove part of the subsidy paid on petrol and pool the accruing funds to finance the country’s social and infrastructural development.

Enhancing education development via Graduate Internship Scheme

Onitsha in Nigeria has one of the world’s biggest markets
Nigeria has Africa’s largest economy. It is mostly known for oil, but that wealth has not trickled down. As it joins the global economic top table, what kind of businesses and businesspeople are thriving in Africa’s most populous nation?

Nigeria’s enterprising five-to-nine work ethic

Rights: Can view and downloadLicense: All Rights ReservedThe MDGs 2010 Report is a Nigeria-specific analysis of the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals. It captures MDG interventions, challenges and successes, as well as ‘misses’ since the Mid-Point Assessment was published in 2007/2008.

<div><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/threepsmars/image/upload/v1662067686/en7fmtitixg1y7snw29k.png" alt=""> </div>&nbsp;When Education and African Entrepreneurs Intersect – 4th Industrial Revolution Lies at the Intersection of Education and Entrepreneurship in Africa – Njideka HarryAfrica’s young innovators can leapfrog into the digital revolution with the right tools and training.Solar energy projects are becoming easier to implement thanks to advances in household power generation and storage systems, Herscowitz told the event. With these systems, “people aren’t just getting two light bulbs and a cellphone charger, but they’re getting access to appliances that basically let them live the same life that a person could live on the grid”, he said.The 4th Industrial Revolution is driven by newer technologies, such as 3D printing, that are changing industrial processes by accelerating them and making them more flexible. With the right tools and training, young innovators in Africa have the opportunity to skip the second industrial revolution — traditional mass production — and leapfrog straight to digital manufacturing. This, in turn, can provide them with a path out of poverty.Africa has shown an incredible ability to leapfrog older forms of technology in favor of adopting the latest. It skipped traditional landlines — as well as dial-up Internet access — and moved straight to mobile broadband. Digital manufacturing and 3D printing will revolutionise Africa’s manufacturing industry in the same way that smart phones and mobile broadband are transforming the service, trade and agricultural industries.Next-Shoring, the ‘Next’ FrontierThe lack of an established manufacturing sector means that most Africans rely on importing items like machine parts, consumables, household goods, tools and building materials. As 3D printing becomes more versatile, African nations can digitally manufacture such objects domestically and reduce dependency on costly imports. It will create an environmentally friendly ecosystem that doesn’t require factories, machinery, labor or capital. The savings, both direct and indirect, will afford many people the opportunity to lift themselves out of poverty.Although growth in the manufacturing sector has long been considered crucial for economic development, it usually represents a small part of African economies. In Nigeria, for example, manufacturing is still at an infant stage, accounting less than 7 percent of GDP, and the local industry depends on imports of raw materials and parts.3D printing has the capacity to transform the supply chain. By 2025, two-thirds of global demand will come from emerging markets, according to McKinsey &amp; Co. As that happens, a new trend of “next-shoring” is expected to move manufacturing areas close to where the raw materials or customers are, cutting down on distribution time and reducing costs. Next-shoring transcends geography and focuses on physical proximity to emerging markets, talent and customers.Take the auto industry in Nigeria, with Ford’s decision to establish a presence and produce roughly 10 units a day for the market. Since Nigeria is a priority market in Sub-Saharan Africa, many companies are looking at how a base there can service the entire region. Reliance on highly specialised suppliers for complex parts can be reduced with 3D printing, and so can the number of suppliers involved across the supply chain.Developing Skills for the FutureAs we enter the 4th Industrial Revolution, one area of concern is how prepared Africa’s students are to become innovators in tomorrow’s economy. Countries will need to ensure that people have the skills they need to compete globally by investing in education and school-to-work transitions.There are two primary entry points into the world of 3D printing. The first is the education sector. Priority should be given to getting the culture of 3D printing into schools so that youth can become conversant with the technology and increase their interest in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).<div><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/threepsmars/image/upload/v1662067773/m1l7jophyxxazk72ocrp.png" alt=""> </div>We’ve seen first-hand the benefits of such programs, with Youth for Technology Foundation partnering with several secondary schools and universities across Nigeria to train several hundred students in human-centered design and 3D Printing. At the Federal Government Girls College in Owerri, 15-year-old Treasure developed a passion for 3D modeling and has been designing and printing rings, phone cases and other small consumables. She is now starting to think about how to market these products to others in her community and sell them in online marketplaces.But employers cannot wait for the right applicants to show up at their doorsteps. They should work with education providers, especially at the tertiary level, to design curricula that fit business needs. They should also take the workplace to the classroom, by lending out members of their own staff to act as instructors and increasing the availability of work-placements programs and other opportunities for practical learning.The second point of entry involves adding knowledge of 3D printing technology to Africa’s innovation corridors. For example, YTF partnered with the GE Garages Lagos program to expose entrepreneurs to the latest in advanced manufacturing technologies, while teaching them to drive innovation through rapid prototyping.YTF supported one of the entrepreneurs from GE Garages, Tochukwu, who designed a reading stand device. The 3D Africa team helped to refine the 3D-printed parts for his product, which was a finalist in the Social Innovation Contest organised by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and Tochukwu was recently able to establish a replica 3D printing hub in Lagos.<a href="https://allafrica.com/stories/201602021570.html" target="_blank">By Njideka Harry, President &amp; CEO, Youth for Technology Foundation – Courtesy All Africa.com </a>&nbsp;

Rights: Can view and downloadLicense: All Rights ReservedThis report has been published by Laurea University of Applied Sciences. Online version of this report can be accessed at http://www.laurea.fi/en/connect/results/Documents/Nigeria%20Country%20Report.pdf.All rights related to this document is being reserved by Laurea University of Applied Sciences.

<a href="http://www.ynaija.com/tunji-olaopa-taking-youth-development-to-the-next-level/" target="_blank">Taking youth development to the next level – by Tunji Olopa (Read from Source)</a>&nbsp;What is the nature of the youth strategy required to harness the youth in Nigeria? What is to be done is clear: We need youth development programmes and value proposition, as well as an execution framework, around which a paradigmatic value reorientation and platforms of engagement can be achievedIt is a very significant fact for our national project today that Nigeria can rightly be considered as a country of young people. This is because more than 70% of Nigeria’s total population is youthful. That demographic figure is an ambivalent fact until we all make a strong and forceful decision about what we want to do with that statistics. One way to treat the fact is to conveniently ignore it and allow it to degenerate to the level where the youthful energies become a source of national worries and security challenge beyond measure. The Mohamed Bouazizi’s frustration and the dimensions that the whole dynamics of the Arab Spring have created as the new face of struggle for national revival ought to give us pause on the wisdom of neglecting such a huge source of unchannelled dynamism.On the other hand, the challenge of the youth could be critically and robustly confronted and reconfigured within the context of our idea and ideals of what we want Nigeria to become. Melvin Tolson, the American poet, once said “Youth has vision! Old age, dreams.” Nigeria is now at a critical juncture in her national history where the dreams of old age must enter into a productive conversation with the vision of youth. In other words, the Nigerian youth constitutes a template for rewriting the dynamism of the national project burdened by the tragic stories of ethnic rivalry and religious chauvinism. This translates immediately into a development platform that integrates the youth as a critical variable while simultaneously including them as one of the development indices.Picking up the challenge of harnessing the youth as a development platform begins from the acceptance of Margaret Thatcher’s warning that “Young people ought not to be idle. It is very bad for them.” What we should add is that the idleness of the youth portend great danger for the Nigerian state and its many visions. To pick up the baton necessarily requires that we transcend the level of narrow focus on their possibilities towards reconsidering them as institutional platforms. Attending to the Nigerian youth, in other words, demands commitment at the level of a paradigm shift. Such a paradigm shift would facilitate a movement from traditional approaches to youth-friendly platforms of engagement — blogs, twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.; (b) a transition from a strict budget resource dependence to a partnership-oriented one; and (c) a change away from a bureaucratic to a result-based performance framework that utilises reward and sanction mechanism.The new youth development strategy transcends the normal, run-of-the-mill diagnosis of youth matter. Indeed, almost everybody within the conventional perspective is an expert on the youth in this sense. Everybody has a handle on the challenge and what the youths are or are not or should be. Within this generalised and uncharted diagnosis, the Nigerian youths are either just a rebellious mass or a cynical lot who have been driven to an agnostic level about leadership commitment. The unfortunate but genuine fact that this diagnosis laments is the employment deficit confronting the youths in Nigeria which deprived the nation of a critical human and social capital the youth affords. However, beyond diagnosis is the requirement of a serious and committed youth strategic action frame that serves as the framework for a comprehensive outline of government action plan that rally the youth towards a nationally galvanised conversation.What is the nature of the youth strategy required to harness the youth in Nigeria? What is to be done is clear: We need youth development programmes and value proposition, as well as an execution framework, around which a paradigmatic value reorientation and platforms of engagement can be achieved. The core of the evolving youth strategy would therefore be rooted in various stakeholders’ platforms that would be veritable points for exchanging knowledge and lessons of what works, what are not working and solution framework for continuous learning and improvement, including celebration of success story. The youth development strategy document deploys the Nigerian youth as an immediate and future value. Such a future, according to Jean-Jacques Ampere, ought to be “the faith of our age: it is the torch of the past, the guiding star of the present”. The youth development strategy adapts the dreams and enthusiastic visions of the Nigerian youth to the Nigerian national project.This youth strategy is significant essentially because it functionally connects other development frameworks. First, the Transformation Agenda as well as the Vision 20:2020 provides an appropriate broad policy roadmap which guides and fills out the aspiration of the youth development strategy that is targeted at certain strategic objectives that secure a better deal for the youths. These include:<ul><li>Creating decent jobs in sufficient quantities to address the protracted problem of unemployment and reduce poverty;</li><li>Laying the foundation for a robust and inclusive growth of the Nigerian economy; and</li><li>Improving, on a sustainable basis, the well-being of all classes of Nigerians regardless of their personal circumstances and location.</li></ul>Second, the new strategy ensures a partnership framework that is a significant shift away from the assumption that youth matter is an all government affairs. Rather, it proposes a means of synergising the contributions of other level of government (states, LGAs) as well as NGOs, community-based organisations, faith-based organisations, private sector and international agencies as well as youth-focused government initiatives which are dispersed across MDAs. All these sectors are brought together under an inter-ministerial platform to confront a three-fold objective:<ul><li>articulate the shared value in Nigeria Youth Development;</li><li>develop holistic plan, to mobilise stakeholders; and</li><li>coordinate all interventions for effective implementation.</li></ul>The institutional arrangement that results from this synergy between government and government as well as with non-governmental organisations ranges from the minute to the truly revolutionary. This arrangement provides an institutional dimension which inter-governmental cooperation, PPP and other platforms can indeed strengthen.We can then move from this specific institutional framework to elaborating certain measurable objectives that will be calibrated into a Youth Development Index (YDI) to encapsulate the narrative of our envisioned shared future with such implementation pillars as:<ul><li>paradigm shift in education and training to breed a new generation of enterprising, skilled, innovative and self-reliant youths;</li><li>meaningful strategies for information, participation and structured inter-generational self-sustained conversation and dialogue;</li><li>permanent structures for smoothening the cutting edge of policy framework and programmes through youth research and networking that leverages social media to build a community of practice and service;</li><li>a national system of evaluation, quality control, accountability and feedback that is interrogated at institutionalised inter-generational platform/forum convened at the highest level</li></ul>The new Action Framework has four main domains. The first is Social Mobilisation, the second is Leadership Development, the third Leverages Social Media as a critical platform for information, education and communication with the Nigerian youth and the fourth is Youth Empowerment. The implementation pillars is expected to be strengthened by a National Training Strategy Framework, defined by a ‘dual system” of education which combines school-based education with in-plant training for building bridges between education, vocations, training, qualification framework, skills-pricing policies/wage policy and employment; with a profiling system to establish the skills that are available, skills gap, the challenges and projected future skills requirement and employment trends by occupation, a prognosis that will be most valuable for decision making.One core concern of the new strategy is to engage more closely with the Nigerian youth. We know for a fact that most of them are now found on the various social media platforms and/or on the internet. We have therefore re-crafted our engagement strategy with this new development in mind. Our technical team has redesigned our website specifically to cater to their needs. We have made it into a portal that would serve as a one-stop-shop for the Nigerian youth. We have also created a dedicated unit that is responsible for maintaining the portal and its associated demands including handling live calls and chats. The youth are changing the world at a tremendous pace, and we, who are tasked with youth development, are evolving and keeping pace.For Andrew Grove, the important things of tomorrow are probably going to be things that are overlooked today. The new youth strategy and framework of action will remain a living document open to progressive review based on our experience in this learning journey. It is our present mandate to ensure such a document evolves as the beginning of a new epoch in the history of youth development and contribution of the youth to national development in Nigeria.– Dr. Olaopa is the Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Youth Development, Abuja.

Social analysts note that some dissenting voices greeted the decision of President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration to remove part of the subsidy paid on petrol and pool the accruing funds to finance the country’s social and infrastructural development. They recall that the critics of the decision then believed that the removal of subsidy would negatively impact on the living standards of Nigerians because of the ripple effects of adjustments in petrol price on the prices of all essential commodities. They, however, note that the cynics were sooner proved wrong by the impressive achievements recorded by the various intervention programmes of the Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme (SURE-P) which was inaugurated in 2012. The Graduate Internship Scheme (GIS) is one of the Social Safety Net projects of SURE-P and it is aimed at providing graduates with quality temporary work experience that will make them stronger candidates for job placements after a one-year internship. Analysts believe that GIS is quite beneficial since it is common knowledge that most of the employed graduates have no prior working experience and such graduates are often rejected by employers who prefer experienced workers. In the scheme, the Federal Government pays a monthly stipend of N30,000 to the graduates, while the participating organisations provide adequate opportunities for training and mentoring during the one-year internship. One of the main objectives of GIS is to enhance the employability of more than 50,000 unemployed graduates across the country through designed internship programmes. Observers note that GIS has done much by stimulating the development of the technical and vocational sector by enhancing its manpower development capacity.See more at: http://www.mynewswatchtimesng.com/enhancing-education-development-via-graduate-internship-scheme/#sthash.sRpvM6Kj.dpuf

<a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/business-31536706" target="_blank">Nigeria’s enterprising five-to-nine work ethic</a>&nbsp;Onitsha in Nigeria has one of the world’s biggest markets. Nigeria has Africa’s largest economy. It is mostly known for oil, but that wealth has not trickled down. As it joins the global economic top table, what kind of businesses and businesspeople are thriving in Africa’s most populous nation?“You’re supposed to hold something,” I was told. “Hold what?” I replied naively.“A sample, you’re supposed to hold a sample of what you’re selling.”Amaka was wondering what a reporter holding a microphone was doing hanging around Onitsha’s main market, neither buying nor selling. She looked at me with pity, as if to say, “if you don’t even know about samples, you have a lot to learn.”I had been at the market for less than five minutes, and someone was already trying to get the measure of what my business was about.There’s plenty to learn about Nigeria in Onitsha, a city in Anambra state on the banks of the River Niger in the south-east of the country.Something like three million people flock here every day, and some call it the biggest market in the world. They come from across the region, to buy everything from high-end mobile phones to low tech plastic containers.What’s your side hustle?Everything is for sale, every price to be haggled, and everyone is involved. Take the market and replicate the buying and selling across millions of homes and offices across Nigeria.Every Nigerian is familiar with the concept of the side hustle – a business on the side. This is a country where everyone has a start-up in their front room, including my mother.I’ll never forget coming home from school to find the entire living and dining area stacked floor to ceiling with cartons of sunflower oil for sale.It was my grandmother who’d taught my mum that if you were lucky enough to have a salaried job, that was just pocket money. The real money came from your five-to-nine, not the nine-to-five.On the surface, Nigeria may not seem like a country that can teach the world much about how to do business…………….<a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/business-31536706" target="_blank">Continue reading: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-31536706</a>&nbsp;By Nkem IfejikaBBC Business reporter.