Self Reliance: NGO Sharpens Professionals On Skills Acquisition

A nongovernmental organisation, Hope Builders has called on graduates from  university and other higher institutions to go for skills acquisition to become employers of labour, saying it is better to create employment than to look for it.

The executive director and Founder of Hope Builders, Rev. Mathias Bodam Yashim said his organisation is into sharpening professionals on skills acquisition.

Speaking at a press conference on Monday about activities lined up for the forthcoming event tagged, Hope Builders Festival, Rev. Yashim added that the society needs more professionals than professors in the world of entrepreneurship.

He said the festival which is expected to hold late November has the theme, “Transformative Innovations for Sustainable Social Change”.

The executive director said his organisation is running a training centre called Enterprise Academy, different from education academy, for skills acquisition by professionals in Nigeria and other countries like Ghana and India.

“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 hundred 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 professionals 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 certificates 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 per cent of all businesses in Nigeria. 67 per cent 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”. Rev. Yashim said.