President Bola Ahmed Tinubu will on Tuesday open a national conference with poverty, unemployment and skills’ gap in Nigeria topping the agenda.
The conference is organized by the All Progressives Congress (APC) think-tank and intellectual resource center, The Progressive Institute (TPI).
The spokesperson of the institute, Wale Abideen, in a statement said the three-day talk shop themed: “Vocational Skills Acquisition, Entrepreneurship and Challenges of Development in Nigeria”, will hold at the Banquet Hall, Presidential Villa, Abuja.
The APC National Chairman, Dr. Abdullahi Umar Ganduje will the host the which he said would serve as intervention as well as to contribute to the Federal Government’s efforts at addressing youth unemployment as well as the current gaps between many university degrees and work place requirements.
“TPI will assemble a team of experts and practitioners to undertake empirical and clinical appraisals of the current challenges and proffer creative and imaginative solutions which will be forwarded to the Federal Government for consideration and implementation.”
The Director General of TPI, Dr. Lanre Adebayo, said the conference with will address advanced skills sector such as Advanced Construction Technologies, Digital Technologies, Technical skills in Mining, Maritime, Advanced Welding Certifications, Skills in Sustainable development and Climate Change Agriculture (including value chain processing, agro-preneurship) etc.
The conference, according to the DG,will undertake comparative and historical analyses of the experiences of countries such as Singapore, Philippines, Malaysia which built their economies on related advanced vocational skills.
“Foreign and Nigerian based groups have been invited to deliver position papers on these areas. And some of them from Britain and China have offered to raise funds for a proposed Zonal Skills Acquisition Centers.”
Adebayo said there are middle level as well as low level vocational skills which will also feature at the programme, adding that the essence is to shortlist these skills especially in the context of their relevance to each of the country’s six geo-political areas.
He said conference seeks a review of the extant Nigerian educational curriculum with a view to examining how to restore and strengthen the vocational content.
“It will also examine how to further utilize the cooperative model in organizing small and medium scale enterprises into powerful economic units especially to create wealth on sustainable basis.”
