Tunji Idowu, the Deputy Executive Director of the Foundation, stated this at the 2020 Lagos State Employment Trust Fund (LSETF) Employment Summit.
The summit, titled: “Showcasing Leading Practices for Job Creation,” focused on remedies that address unemployment and the future of jobs in Africa.
“Everything is about partnerships,” he said. “No single institution or entity can solve or address the problems of Nigeria. PIND has been functioning and sustaining its operations through partnership. PIND from day one was focused on facilitating and fostering partnerships between people in the public sector in the local and state governments in the Niger Delta, people in the private sector, companies with business concerns, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). The governments must also do so to create jobs.”
The summit, which aimed at organisations sharing various models on job creation, was attended by both local and international organizations with about 52 speakers and more than 200 delegates.
The executive director of the NGO said one of the ways PIND has done well is to partner with people.
Quality data is key in addressing unemployment
According to a 2018 report of the Nigeria Bureau of Statistics (NBS), Nigeria’s unemployment rate stood at 23.1% of the workforce in the third quarter of 2019, up from 18.1% a year earlier.
Idowu added that the state government to invest in data to address the issue of unemployment, saying that lack of data planning on the side of the state governments is a challenge to job creation.
According to him, “Data will let you know what is happening in the market, how many people are gainfully employed, how many are not, how many are unemployed, what kind of skills do the market requires, what needs to happen, and what you need to pay attention to. Data helps to plan and design interventions so that they are relevant to the market space.”
On his part, Afolabi Imoukhuede, the Senior Special Adviser to President Muhammadu Buhari on job creation, also urged the private sectors to lead the way in jobs and opportunities creation, while advising the state governments to provide good policy and an enabling environment for the private sectors to operate.
