TheCable

Sunday Dare, minister of youth and sports development, says a synergy between the federal government and youths is key to achieving sustainable development.

The minister spoke on Tuesday during an interactive session with a delegation of the Nigeria Youth Future Funds (NYFF) in his office in Abuja.

Dare commended the NYFF for efforts to empower the youth. He also corroborated the organisation’s position that there is a mismatch between graduate degrees and the jobs available.

Dare said the cyber security training facilitated by the ministry became expedient as half a million jobs were available in the sector in 2021 but with inadequate certified cyber security experts to fill them.

“Cyber security training is a specialised type of training so we partnered with Halogen and the first two days when we announced that training, 61,000 youth applied. We are managing to train about 10,000, to get them certified. With that certification, virtually out of every 5 organisations, 3 of them are looking for cyber security experts,” he said.

“We look forward to really getting the profile on NVP and details of it after which we would explore areas we can plug into.”

Dare urged the organisation to look beyond urban youth in its outreach, adding that research has shown that 56 per cent of youth between 15 to 35 years live in rural areas.

“The ministry is ready to partner with NYFF to expand access to its signature youth development programmes like the Digital Entrepreneurship Empowerment Leadership (DEEL) scheme and the National Youth Investment Fund (NYIF), amongst others,” he added.

In her remark, Chineye Nwanaka, co-chair of the NYFF board, said its mandate include national visioning process, youth leadership development and online & media engagement.

“Part of what we are doing is partnering with key institutions to try and put this into the curriculum to ensure we leverage on e-learning skills and capacity building for young people,” Nwanaka said.