TETFund: Making Nigerian Graduates Employable, by Rahma Oladosu
The rate of unemployment in Nigeria in this 21st century is alarming. It keeps getting worse without any corresponding effort to address it.
Unarguably, unemployment is one of the fundamental developmental challenges facing Nigeria at the moment. Research has shown that even though unemployment was high in the 1980s, but the available reports from various local and international bodies, and the glaring evidence on the streets of Nigeria have shown that there was never a time in Nigeria’s history that unemployment has been as serious it is now.
No doubt, the expectation of every average graduate is to secure a well-paying job upon the conclusion of studies but the harsh reality in the Nigerian labour sphere is that the completion of tertiary education serves as no guarantee for securing any meaningful employment. However, this has not always been so.
Unemployment, among a myriad of definitions connotes a situation whereby persons capable and willing to work are unable to find suitable paid employment. According to recent statistics, Nigeria’s unemployment rate as at the second quarter of 2020 was 27.1 per cent. This means that about 21.7 million Nigerians remain unemployed, a figure that exceeds the population of 35 of Africa’s 54 countries.
This year, the unemployment rate in Nigeria is estimated to reach 33 percent. This figure was projected in 2021 when the figure was 32.5 percent. Chronological data also show that the unemployment rate in Nigeria rose constantly in the past years.
It is one thing however to lament about the terrible unemployment situation in the country, it is another thing to find out if the so-called graduates being churned by higher institutions are even employable. Modern-day workplaces don’t care much about paper qualifications or certificates, the emphasis is now on competence, capacity, proficiency and efficiency in handling tasks. If a particular organisation has a problem or a vacuum, the question it will ask its Human Resource Department is whether the job seekers at its disposal can solve that particular problem or fill that vacuum adequately. But with what is happening in the Nigerian educational institutions these days, right from foundation levels to the highest levels, the quality of school leavers has deteriorated badly. More often than not, young people these days just go to school for the sake of earning certificates, not to prepare themselves for a challenging or competitive work environments.
Aside low quality of teaching and poor learning environments, observers have in recent years questioned the priority and focus of education policy makers in terms of course contents. These observers are of the belief that the course contents and courses generally don’t emphasise personal development, human capital development, entrepreneurship skills and also creativity and innovation, all of which can make any graduate stand out and be able to fend for himself, whether employed or unemployed.
For this trend to change, something drastic or fundamental has to be done. Sometime last month, Nigeria’s sole administrator of education tax proceeds for institutions of higher learning in the country, the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) therefore reaffirmed its readiness to partner with the Innovation Start Ups Centre of Excellence, otherwise known as Innov8 Hub, in Abuja for practical training and mentorship for Nigerian youth with a view to producing employable graduates.
Innov8 Hub is an Innovation Startup driven organisation with a mandate to groom generations of innovators, inventors and researchers across board. The Hub is a focal point for Creative Invention, Innovation, Research and Development, Designing and Fabrication, Human Capital Development and Prototyping in Africa.
Assuring stakeholders of his agency’s commitment to the idea, the Executive Secretary, Arc. Sonny Echono, said, “For TETFund, in our new paradigm, we will collaborate with you a great deal, and then try to get all our institutions to buy into this, so you can spread it across all our campuses.”
The obvious reason behind this unique collaboration is to produce future graduates who are full of skills and who can add value to any work environment they find themselves.
We have seen Countries like China, Singapore and Malaysia use this method, so replicating this in Nigeria would definitely be a path to greatness because more efforts in this direction are needed so that unemployed youths stand a bigger chance of being useful to themselves and the society.
Collaboration between tertiary institutions, especially the universities and polytechnics, and the private sector is a welcome development as such would create the favourable atmosphere for innovation and invention to thrive.
In order to overcome the challenges currently facing the sector, I believe this collaboration between TETFund and Innova8 hub will help varsities produce graduates that can fit into the work place, graduates that can readily get employment or on their own become entrepreneurs and employers of labour because with the modern trend globally, practical knowledge acquisition is the only thing that can put Nigeria on the path to enduring prosperity and at the same time be a huge step in cutting down the scary unemployment rates in the nation.
Rahma Olamide Oladosu is a Staff Writer with the Economic Confidential
