By Fabian Anawo
The British Government is set to impart employability skills in hundreds of thousands of Nigerian youths.
It hopes to achieve this in collaboration with Prince’s Trust International established by Prince Charles.
Speaking at the launch of Princes International in Lagos, the British Deputy High Commissioner, Mr. Ben Llewellyn-Jones said that there is an urgent need to reduce youth unemployment which is already at over forty percent.
He noted that Nigeria is Africa’s economic power house with seventy percent of the population under thirty years.
Mr. Llewellyn-Jones said that a large number of the country’s youth are not employable, hence the need to bridge the gap by training them in various skills to be employable and imparting in them enterpreneural skills to own and manage businesses.
The Chief Executive Officer of Prince’s Trust International, Mr. Will Straw said that the organization was set up to tackle the global crisis in youth unemployment.
He said that they hope to achieve success through the three programmes they have designed to tackle the challenge.
The first is education, providing alternative approaches to learning by focusing on personal development and building skills for employment.
The second is an employment programme whereby they collaborate with employers to develop the skills of the youth and thereafter retain outstanding ones while the third is enterprise, giving young people the chance to explore business management and equip them with the skills and knowledge to succeed.
Mr. Straw said that Prince’s Trust was established in 1977 but went global in 2015.
It currently works in eighteen countries within the Commonwealth and across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Middle East and Europe, and has empowered over seventy thousand people to learn, earn and thrive.