Kaduna Based NGO Trains 29,000 Youths in Skill Acquisition in Three Years

A Kaduna-based non-governmental-organisation, Hope Builders, said it has successfully trained over 29,000 youths in various skill acquisition programmes since the start of 2021.

The Executive Director and Founder of Hope Builders, Rev. Mathias Bodam Yashim, while addressing a press conference in Kaduna, declared that it was better to create employment than to seek for one.

According to him, graduates from Nigerian universities and other tertiary institutions must go for skills acquisition in order to be self-reliance.

Yashim said his organisation is into sharpening professionals on skills acquisition, adding that the society needs more professionals than professors in the world of entrepreneurship.

Speaking on activities lined up for his organisation’s maiden festival, the Executive Director, said the festival expected to hold late November has the theme, ‘Transformative Innovations for Sustainable Social Change.’

He said during the festival, the organisation is targeting to train additional 100 entrepreneurs for empowerment to the 29,000 trained so far by the group.

He noted that his organisation is also 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.

He said, “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 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.”