No fewer than 500 inmates in each Correctional Centre across the country will receive vocational training and N500,000 grant to start up useful ventures after serving their jail terms in the next 12 months, the Presidency has said.
The Senior Special Assistant to the President on Technical, Vocational and Entrepreneurial Education, Abiola Arogundade, disclosed this while addressing a press conference in Abuja on Wednesday.
According to her, the programme was part of a plan by the current administration of President Bola Tinubu to bring down the number of 133 million people who are said to be living in poverty in Nigeria.
Arogundade stated that the scheme has already began in some correctional centres and would cover all of the custodial facilities in the country with a focus on inmates who are closer to the end of their jail terms and they will be trained in fashion designing, Information Technology, soap making, fashion, poultry, fishing, among other vocations.
“We’ve started training in the correctional centres. We launched the scheme in Kuje. We took a few members from my office to the correctional centre to do an audit of the needs of the inmates. I’m happy to announce that we started conducting the assessment and auditing of the trainees.
“So after Kuje Correctional Centre, we are moving to Suleja. We are going to try and duplicate this intervention in all our correctional centres across the country.
“In each correctional center, we would like to train a minimum of 500 inmates. In Kuje now there are 723 of them but we will like to train a minimum of 500 and the reason is that we can not compel them to be trained, it’s something that you want to do, not something like military.
“Those that do not, we will try to educate them in a little way on why the training is important. Some of them said ‘if we are trained, what we will use it for?’. So we announced to them any single person that’s trained under my office will get access to N500,000 to start up,” she said.
Arogundade said apart from vocational skills, the inmates would be trained on total rehabilitation, mental health and reintegration into the society while they would be monitored in the application of the the skills as well as the N500,000 grant and those that do well will be given non-collateral loans ranging from N3million to N5million.
She said the programme would be expanded to cover out-of-school children, those in conventional learning institutions as well as graduates who want to acquire extra skills for self-employment and empowerment.
“I am also working with the House of Representatives Committee Chairman on Polytechnics, Vocational and Technical Education; so what we were talking about is even trying to incorporate a lot of those who are going to come out of secondary schools between SSS 1 and SSS 3 to at least come out with one skill. We are working on that and that is very important.
“This is for out-of-school children (also) that is what it’s designed for but even people that have degrees that want alternative source of income, we can encourage them to come and learn skills. So we are leaving nobody out,” the presidential aide added.
