By Ibrahim Hassan,Kaduna

The Executive Director and Founder of
Hope Builders, an NGO,Rev. Mathias Bodam Yashim has said that his organisation has so far trained 29,000 entrepreneurs and called on graduates from university and other higher institutions to go for skills acquisition to become employers of labour.

Speaking at a press conference in Kaduna on Monday,Rev Yashim said it is better to create employment than to look for it, the reason why they committed energy and resources into sharpening professionals on skills acquisition.

He said the society needed more professionals than professors in the world of entrepreneurship,adding that their festival scheduled for November in Kaduna has the theme: “Transformative Innovations for Sustainable Social Change”.

He explained that Hope Builders is running a training centre called Enterprise Academy, which is different from education academy, for skills acquisition by professionals in Nigeria, India,Ghana and other parts of the world.

“In our Enterprise Academy, we are putting professionals together to look at the future of enterprises based on skills acquisition. Of course, the exhibition is open to everybody. We want to encourage everybody to put aside academic qualifications and concentrate on the skills you can demonstrate. We are targeting more than 100 entrepreneurs, at least at the end of the exhibition we want to have 100 entrepreneurs empowered.”

“We have students not only from Nigeria, but from other countries like Ghana and India. We train professional on skills, we are not the talking professionals as in higher institutions like universities or colleges of education. We work on your skills. We have so far trained 29,000 entrepreneurs. Here we ask professionals to put aside their certificates and talk about what they have read in the university.”

“For example, if you are a journalist, you have to talk about journalism, if you are a marketer you have to talk about marketing, who is your target, how do you want to sell, so on and so forth. We need more professionals than professors now. We need skills to create wealth, create employment, and not to acquire certificate to look for jobs. We are working gradually towards getting more participants from the local areas.”

“There are 36.9 million MSMEs representing 96.7% of all businesses in Nigeria. 67% of these MSMEs are youth owned. However, the business environment is so volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. 73% of them face liquidity challenges because most of them depend on grants and projects from donor agencies.”

“We are building a space for intergenerational dialogue to support young, resourceful and willing entrepreneurs and upcoming social entrepreneurs to generate sustainable revenue sources.”

“We are strengthening the capabilities of at least 100 entrepreneurs to enable them apply systems-changing innovations towards ventures’ resilience and long-term sustainability,” he said.

He said some of the youths needed just contacts , while others needed their capabilities to be strengthened.

“So by the time we come with them, we would be able to do that. Now where you’re sitting,we have the Hope Builders Academy that is accredited to coach candidates to own their MBA in Switzerland. By the grace of God, the first to be graduating, would sit down here. We have students not just here, we have students in India, in Ghana and all over.”

“With the first graduation, I think even in Switzerland they will tell you they’ve never seen the power that’s coming from Hope Builders I know that we would have more students that are coming from outside of Africa. So, I’m hoping that from the festival we’re going to get real resourceful entrepreneurs from within, that we would bring into the academy, and then we strengthen them,” he said.