The International Labour Organisation (ILO), has declared that the launch of ILO- Start and Improve your Business (SIYB), in Nigeria is a giant stride which will be highly beneficial to the country as it will assist in job creation, thereby reducing youth dependence on the government for employment.
The ILO Senior Specialist Employers Activities, Mr. Hezion Njuguna, made the declaration during the official launch of ILO-SIYB in Nigeria by the ILO at the Secretariat of the Employers’ Consultative Association (NECA), in Lagos .
He said “The launch of Start and Improve your Business (SIYB) in Nigeria is a giant stride which will be highly beneficial to the country as it will assist in job creation.
According to Njuguna , Africa is the world’s second-fastest-growing region where poverty is falling, and about 90 million of its households have joined the world’s consuming class, an increase of 31 million in just over a decade.
“Despite the creation of 37 million new and stable wage-paying jobs over the past decade, only 28 percent of Africa ’s labor force holds such positions. Instead, some 63 percent of the total labor force engage in some form of self-employment or vulnerable employment, such as subsistence farming or urban street hawking.? “And? if the trends of the past decade continue, Africa will create 54 million new stable wage-paying jobs over the next ten years but this will not be enough to absorb the 122 million new entrants into the labor force expected over the same period”, he said.
“But a new McKinsey Global Institute report, Africa at Work: Job Creation and Inclusive Growth, shows that the continent must create wage-paying jobs more quickly to sustain these successes and ensure that growth benefits the majority of its people”, he added.
Earlier, the Director General of NECA, Mr Olusegun Oshinowo, in an opening remark urged youths to explore and develop the potentials in them as a tool to generate employment.
He said, “The launch of the? ILO-SIYB is an open door? that has now been created for youths in Nigeria to be self-employed.
Unlike in the past,? just one in ten Nigerians gets employed when they graduate from their? institutions after their National Youth Service Corpsc (NYSC),? but now, a future can be built when an individual depends on the power to generate an idea that would grow an enterprise to create jobs.”