As part of efforts toward guiding young people and women to self-reliant and reduce unemployment in the society, a FIFA License agent, Muhammad Mustapha, through his charity organisation, 9ja Food Fiesta, has trained 1000 youth and women on ICT, agriculture and culinary arts In FCT.
Mustapha made the disclosure during certificate presentation to the graduates at the Velodrome in Moshood Abiola National Stadium, Abuja, yesterday.
He said the certificates were presented to the trainees after undergoing three months intensive training at their respective centers across FCT.
According to Mustapha, he got his passion for empowering youth and women to be self-reliant from his sports background. “I’m a FIFA License agent and as a sports person, our main aim is to discover and nurture talents. So, as a youth of FCT, I saw a lot of youth out there having nothing to do.
“So, I took the mentality of my sports background to the other way by establishing my own NGO, 9ja Food Fiesta, and my dream is to do a lot of capacity training for youth in states, not just FCT. Our goal is to train 2000 youth and women in each state, but I decided to start with FCT by putting together a formidable team under a charity organisation and started this laudable project of training youth and women on ICT, agriculture and culinary arts,” he said.
Mustapha added that plans are underway to provide starter-parts for the trainees after their graduation to enable start-up their business immediately.
“We have a lot of plans and we have created a database platform to store all the people we are going to train and monitor their progress after graduation. We are trying to get more partners on board so that we can be able to assist the trainees with starter parts and monitor how they are using the start apart, because one thing is to undergo training and another thing is to make use of the knowledge gained from training after graduating.
“Today, we are issuing certificates to 1000 youth and women in FCT who are batch A and another 1000 youth who are batch B will be commencing their training next week and it will run till December.
“We are calling on the government to come and empower these youths so that they will be able to use the training that we have given to them to help and sustain their future after today.
“After the FCT, we are going to other states like Kano and Lagos that have already invited us to come and train their youth and women on capacity building. We are going to all the 36 states in Nigeria one by one and our goal is to train 2000 in each state,” Mustapha concluded.
