Youth Empowerment

Starter Packs for RYSA trainees

Youth empowerment is high on Dr. Okowa’s agenda as their engagement would engender peace in the state. To this effect, the government has initiated a lot of skill acquisition projects to get the youth meaningfully engaged. Programmes such as ICT-Youth Empowerment Programme (ICT-YEP), Rural Youth Skill Acquisition Programme (RYSA).

ICT-YEP is aimed at providing necessary ICT skills training to enable self-employment for start-ups (youth) that will be based in Delta State. At the end of the training programme, participants are provided with starter packs. Tertiary Institution Entrepreneur Programme (TEP) is another State government intervention programme for tertiary institutions to produce work-ready and self-employed graduates. This will hopefully mitigate graduate employment significantly. RYSA is designed to take skill acquisition programmes to the rural youth population with the objectives to create income earning opportunities, stem youth restiveness, discourage rural-urban drift and grow the local economy.

MULTI-PURPOSE YOUTH TRAINING CENTRE, EGBOKODO, WARRI

Multi-Purpose Youth Training Centre was founded in 2008 and jointly funded by the United Nations Development programme (UNDP), Full scale training activities started in 2014 to meet industrial demands and to boost gainful self-employment to harness the entrepreneurial acumen of the restive youth with a view to alleviating poverty and crime rate in the society.

In order for the Centre to attain this premier status, the instructors and workshop assistants were trained in Quality Assurance Assessment by the National Board for Technical Education (NBTE) Kaduna in April 2019. Today all instructors and workshop assistants are Quality Assurance Assessors (QAAs) while the Centre Administrator is an Internal Quality Assurance Manager (IQAM). The Centre is also registered as a NABTEB Modular Examination Center. Training is therefore based on the National operational standard of each
occupation so as to meet industrial and labour requirements for employment.

YOUTH MONITORING AND MENTORING

The Directorate of Youth Monitoring and Mentoring (DYMM) was established in 2016 to monitor the training activities of agencies that have to do with job and wealth creation in the state and also mentor the beneficiaries of these programmes after training and empowerment.
The agency is charged with following responsibilities:

Monitoring and evaluation of all youth job and wealth creation intervention programmes in the state to create maximum benefits to the State.
Proactive communication and flag-up of issues that may hinder the growth and sustenance of youth empowerment programmes in the State.
Providing technical support for all youth empowerment programmes in the State.

OUTCOMES
Monitoring and Evaluation
The training activities of over 6,000 beneficiaries from STEP, YAGEP, RYSA and GEST were successfully monitored during the period. Our monitoring activities have helped to achieve the following:

Improve the quality of training that beneficiaries of the job and wealth creation programmes get;
Improve discipline amongst trainees;
Improve service delivery amongst agencies of government involved in job and wealth creation.

Mentoring
About 1,500 beneficiaries were successfully mentored by the Directorate during the period.
Plans are on to mentor another 4,000 this year.
Our mentoring programmes have helped the beneficiaries to achieve the following:

Register their businesses with Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC);
Prepare their business plans;
Learn how to set goals and achieve them;
Appropriately brand their business enterprises;
Learn how to handle customers;

Overall, the results of our monitoring and mentoring efforts have been remarkable with several success stories of established beneficiaries.