"We are going to join millions of unemployed graduates." The problem of incorporating entrepreneurship courses into the youth service programme in Nigeria

Abstract

As part of the measures to deal with the rate of youth unemployment in Nigeria, entrepreneurship programmes were incorporated into the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) scheme, which was initially meant to promote common national awareness among graduate youths. While this experiment created a problem due to the NYSC posting policy, the empowerment programmes face other challenges that constrain their outcome. The posting policy privileged the allocation of graduate youths to work establishments where many of them are either under-utilised or incompetent. The NYSC empowerment programmes, on the other hand, grappled with the problems of corruption by job empowerment agencies, the negative attitude of corps members towards vocational and technical skill acquisition and inadequate resources to assist corps members who want to put their business plans into practice. The present paper concludes that the NYSC posting policy and empowerment programmes offer corps members little chance for the acquisition of relevant skills needed for self-development and is unable to properly address the problem of unemployment in Nigeria.