SAED designed to solve graduate unemployment
Recent
Innovations in the Scheme
In
response to the prevailing social-economic realities, the scheme in recent
years, made the following giant strides to further consolidate its
achievements:
Skills Acquisition and Entrepreneurship Development
(SAED)
The
Skills Acquisition and Entrepreneurship Development (SAED) department was
established in 2012 with mandate to drive the scheme’s collaboration with
various stakeholders towards addressing the problem of graduate unemployment.
The SAED programme is designed to equip corps members with vocational skills
while also developing their business and entrepreneurial capacities. Presently,
corps members are being trained in skill areas such as Agro-Allied, Food
Preservation and Processing, Culture and Tourism, Cosmetology, Information and
Communication (ICT), Environment, Beautification, Construction, Education,
Power and Energy, Film and Photography and Automobile Technology. The scheme is collaborating with national and
international organisations towards providing material, technical and financial
support for the programme. So far, over 1,132,409 corps members have been
sensitised and over 700,000 have undergone various forms of skills training.
The
BOI-NYSC Graduate Empowerment Fund, which is a product of our partnership with the
Bank of Industry (BOI), is yielding encouraging results with the sum of over N540
million so far disbursed as loans to 325 corps entrepreneurs. In the same vein,
the Central Bank of Nigeria, in partnership with Heritage Bank, has disbursed N15,
000,000 to seven corps members under
the NYSC/CBN Youth Entrepreneurship development Programme (YEDP).
A
number of skill centres have also been established across the country for the
post-camp training of corps members. Through our Public-Private Partnership
drive, Access Bank has undertaken and completed the building of a 1000 capacity
mega skills training centre for the Northeast zone of Nigeria located in Gombe,
the Gombe state capital. In the same vein, the American multi-national General
Electric, in conjunction with the International Labour Organisation (ILO) under
the Cognity Advisory Partnership has trained 40 NYSC staff who are now ILO certified
Business Entrepreneurship Trainers. They are presently training and supporting
corps members for the effective implementation of the SAED programme.
In
addition to this, a significant number of NYSC staff have also benefitted from
international capacity building training in China, America and Europe, which
has tremendously boosted the training and mentoring of corps entrepreneurs. We
have also successfully staged a Skills and Entrepreneurship Development
Festival during which corps members from all states of the federation and the
FCT converged on Abuja to showcase their entrepreneurial skills through
competitions and products exhibition.
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NYSC Ventures Initiatives