NGO empowers 100 youths with skills in Gombe
A non-governmental organisation, Advocacy Centre for Development, has begun a 30-day training for 100 youths in Gombe State, aimed at empowering them with skills to make them self-reliant.
Mr Ibrahim Yusuf, the Team Lead, Advocacy Centre for Development while speaking with journalists in Gombe on Saturday said the training was in collaboration with Science Village, Gombe, a private school.
Yusuf said the training would help the selected youths to acquire 21st-century skills, computer literacy, English language proficiency, and Arabic language skills.
He said that the ongoing protest by youths was a reminder of the need for stakeholders to act quickly in empowering youths with the needed skills to be self-reliant.
According to him, skills hold the key to bridging the unemployment gap in the country as well as diverting the attention of youths from crimes.
He stated that the training was aimed at complementing the efforts of governments in addressing the challenge of unemployment and empowering youths to become active contributors to national development.
“Training and retraining remains key to solving youth restiveness and other vices by youths.
“One of the major drivers of this protest is the idleness of youths, and if we can engage in partnership like this to train 100 persons per month, then we are making progress,” he said.
Yusuf called on government and other well-to-do Nigerians to support the training so as to empower more youths in the state so they could engage in productive ventures.
Alhaji Kabiru Tsoho, an elder statesman who attended the event to encourage the youths urged them to seize the opportunity to become better citizens and future employers of labour.
Tsoho commended the organisers for the laudable initiative and urged other stakeholders to emulate them.
“I call on the well-to-do individuals and organisations to provide programmes that support young people in becoming self-reliant,” he said.
One of the participants, Ms Yaksi Sandra expressed thanked the organisers while promising to leverage the skills in complementing her certificate for effective productivity.
