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By EyiTee Pemu

On 2nd March 2022, UNICEF Nigeria alongside its co-partner; The Tony Elumelu Foundation and a host of reputable private & public sector entities (including Price Waterhouse Coopers, Microsoft, IHS Nigeria,  Airtel, Africa Development Bank, World Bank, International Labour Organisation and others) gathered for the inaugural meeting of GEN-U9ja (Generation Unlimited) Steering committee at EKO Hotel, Lagos.

This powerful group of interests convened to deliberate on charting a progressive & transformative course for Nigerian youth. Vanguard media was present as a partner and participant in the discourse. UNICEF Nigeria – Country Director; Peter Hawkins spoke with Vanguard afterwards on the vision behind GEN-U 9Ja, its implementation and expectations. Interview by EyiTee Pemu.

Question: First of all, I would start by saying congratulations once again. With today’s stakeholder meeting. We can firmly say that the GEN-U9ja train has left the station. Thus far, UNICEF has been able to garner a lot of interest from a core group of key stakeholders; what are the next steps from this point?

Peter: In many ways, the train indeed has indeed left this particular station. It’s a journey and there are many stations along the route. So in the beginning, we decided there were three elements that young people are affected by or what young people could benefit from; the first was access to digital platforms. The second was workforce readiness, being able to look for work (i.e employability)  and entrepreneurship and its skills that are important, and then the third was youth engagement, a voice so that they can outline the challenges that they have but more importantly, what are the solutions? So fundamentally, these 3 elements are interconnected as I think we heard today.

There isn’t just one pillar, two pillars or three, they’re interconnected in actual fact if we didn’t categorise them as pillars and have the conversation as we did today, it would have flowed exactly the same way.

Now most importantly, unless you engage young people and make them feel they have a voice and understand that they are important. Whatever you do or construct with digital platforms, whatever you do as regards employability and entrepreneurship, there’s no ownership. Then it’s not theirs – it’s for the “ogas”.

I think Nigeria is changing bit by bit and we have got to look at the different areas where that change is and be able to build on it. The private sector’s definitely changing, you look around here, there are much younger people that are more in tune with what’s happening here, across the world and demanding the same. Youth are the majority of the population and you simply cannot disregard them, the key is to listen to young people and establish what they want and what they’re doing.

When you look at social mobilization and the people present at the meeting today like Banky W and Zephia (Ovia), it’s their constituency, young people; so you would only applaud them as they’re putting in their own time, their own effort to talk about young people and carry the message of GEN-U 9ja so it resonates. So I think what today was about was getting that cross-fertilisation discussion going.

The second is how do you take it to scale because we can do little projects but you don’t even start to go far so you’ve got to move fast and scale and that means 36 states working at the same time in the same space and the same pace. The key is to try to strike a balance that ensures we can continue and remain sustainable.

And that’s in effect our position on digital skills connectivity. With employability and entrepreneurship, It’s about the skills and awareness of young people, they will find their own fit. I call it “the cheese in the sandwich” if you can help them through access to the digital platforms, access to learning, access to life skills, whether in school, out of school, it doesn’t matter where it is, the goal is to ensure that everyone is literate and numerate at a high level. That’s the minimum. The rest they would figure out how to become competent. Then you return to ”the cheese in the middle of the sandwich” now the other side of the cheese is the jobs and the entrepreneurship.

And as CEO, Tony Elumelu Foundation said today over 70% of these jobs are in the SME category, our focus is ensuring we’re in a stronger position collectively but it’s the ”connective”. And what we witnessed today at the launch is that connective – other parties & interests in the room like UNILEVER saying, ‘I need people who are like this’, that defines the skills. You have Jobberman saying, I can connect these sort of people to those sort of jobs, let’s say the Tony Elumelu Foundation will deliver these sort of people to those sorts of SMEs.

That’s how we will create even more opportunities with all the cross-platform engagement, yes it may be challenging but this is what we have in view, when I engage with CEOs of a lot of these companies, they cannot get enough people who are in technology space, their biggest concern in Nigeria with a population of 206 million, youth population – digital population of 60 – 70 million. They cannot find people to work for them and when they do find and train them about 30% disappear every year. And immediately they acquire a skill, they leave the organisation so you have got to you appreciate there are multiple sides to it. Migration of talent is an issue that needs to be faced honestly

Peter Cont’d: the migration figures I can share, these are the official migrant’s figures, in 2018 it was something like 26,000, in 2019 it was 35,000 roughly. In 2020 it was 105,000. A lot of them were health workers going to the UK, Canada, Ireland and places like that. Now, some of them would be tech people going to Canada and The U.S. The fact is Nigeria is the most educated micronation in the United States and we are sitting here while our health services, educational services and so on are gone; so the skills, resilience, knowledge, innovation that Nigeria is blessed with is truly awesome and can basically do anything. Hence the need to focus on skills, jobs, entrepreneurship. How do you develop and enable and not just for export? How do we cultivate these elements for impact here and not to impact other places?

I believe I mentioned this last time, as we began to have a discussion around food production and the food value chain. Do young people go back and do agriculture? Of course, they would, if they see a return. 2) Are young people starting SMEs to be involved in the food value chain? Yes, they are, you just need to create that environment and then you need to empower them.

Digital money is in focus now i.e mobile money. Wherever you are in Nigeria say over 80% of the country, you can send and receive money. And that in itself is empowerment; it means that I’m sitting in the hinterland of any Nigerian town or city and I have access to money, I don’t have to rely on a bank, I can access cash. It’s even more important the other way. You are a young person, say a farmer in Kwara, you produce onions, you produce one ton of onion as your harvest and you want to sell that and you don’t know how much it is, what is the value of that onion?

So you text someone in Lagos or in Abuja or Port Harcourt and ask what’s the worth of one kilo in the marketplace. He responds and says 500 naira per kilo. So immediately you have empowered that person enquiring, if he has 10 kilos of onions, the guy in Port Harcourt says I’ll send you this amount of money and you’ll send me the goods. He’s also made money when he’s converted his skills and assets to value.

if it’s done digitally, there’s greater accountability and the system will initiate sending him the produce, and upon arrival; there is a value exchange.

it’s those sorts of things that drive digital skills and enhance employability; all coming together to release social and economic value.

Interviewer: As the GEN-U plan is to reach 20 million youth by 2030, how do we measure impact? In that, it’s not just about reaching them but also impacting them.

Peter: Absolutely. And it’s all about results. It’s beyond reaching them but allowing them to progress. You know, when we initially came up with 20 million, this was 2 years ago. They (stakeholders) all said it was not enough, let’s aim for 40 million by 2030. Immediately I knew we had lit a candle because if people are pushing you up.

It’s because the ideas are right and progressive. So we kept it at 20 million, but the candle was lit. Now for each of the pillars, we have targets. And we can quantify the output, to say 20 million young people have had access to the digital platforms for example through school to school/community to community connectivity.

We can quantify that, can’t say what they’ve done with that. But go back to what I said at the beginning; young Nigerians are resilient, they’re innovative, they’re talented, anywhere in the world there is that talent that youth are imbued with. All they need is that platform to do so you’ve given them connectivity, they will use it to develop skills.

As I said, it’s not just about jobs to us, it’s about giving young people the right skills and then creating the connection between skill and jobs. At the end of the day, the young people have to find their own jobs or their own areas of being entrepreneurs. Our plan is to equip them with the means and tools to make progressive things happen and alter the narrative for Nigerian youth from this point well into the future.

Vanguard News Nigeria