A beneficiary of the Pro-Poor Growth and Promotion of Employment in Nigeria (SEDIN) program, Mr Joseph Lukas on Tuesday, appealed to the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ) and the European Union (EU) to deepen the cooperation with the Federal Government of Nigeria with the aim of extending SEDIN activities to all schools in the Nigeria.
Lukas, who was trained under the Students Entrepreneurship Activity (SEA) Hub, an arm of SEDIN, said he the programme changed his life for better by increasing his production capacity and earning power by six hundred percent.
The beneficiary, who made the call while discussing his Story-of-Change at a one-day GIZ-SEDIN webinar tagged ‘SEDIN: accelerating impact, improving the economy,’ explained that developing his entrepreneurial skill while still pursuing his education gave him peace about his former worries of being able to finance his tertiary education, adding that he would be able to finance his university education from the proceeds of his shoe-cobbler trade.
SEDIN is an entrepreneurial support programme cofounded by the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ) and the European Union (EU). The programme aims to promote economic development and employment in Nigeria through creating opportunities for financial literacy, SME business training and coaching loop, start-up loop, sustainable agricultural policies, group formation, farmer business school and student entrepreneurship activity-hubs (SEA-Hub).
He said: ‘I was a student of Government Secondary School, Township, Jos, Plateau State when GIZ introduced the Students Entrepreneurship Activity Hubs, and I became a beneficiary,’ adding that he was already a shoe maker before the visit of GIZ.
‘They trained students who are in interested in doing business,’ he said, adding that every student was encouraged to choose one of various trades introduced.
He said ‘at the time, twenty other students of the school were also interested in learning one of the various trades, so everyone chose a trade.’
‘Among the trades are shoe-making and printing, and I have a friend who chose printing and he is also doing very well now,’ he said.
Joseph said the training improved his shoe-making business, adding that it improved the quality of my shoe products and increase my production capacity, a development he said attracted more customers to him, thereby significantly increasing his income.
‘I currently work with a shoe company here in Abuja and I look forward to establishing my own shoe making company soon.’
Discussing the impact of SEA-Hub on his business, Lukas said, ‘Before I was trained, I could not make more than ten shoes in one month, but I now produce more than sixty shoes within one month.’
‘While I am grateful to all those who made the training a success, I wish to encourage them to extend the goodwill to all the schools in my country, they should introduce the platform to every school in Nigeria because it will create job opportunities to young people and reduce crime,’ Lukas added.
Coordinator of the Students Entrepreneurship Activity (SEA) Hub programme, Mr Babafemi Oyediran said the program is currently in progress in four Partner-States of the Federation, namely Niger, Plateau, Ogun and Edo.
Discussing the motivation that led to the founding of SEA-Hub programme, Oyediran said: ‘Over the past few years, we observed that unemployment was on the rise among young and old people in Nigeria, and we began to develop a mechanism for job and wealth creation.’
According to Oyediran, the entrepreneurship programme is a strategy for job creation that has been able to support a number of people, adding that beneficiaries involve various categories of people – young men, women and the elderly, as well as some established businesses that needs newfound knowledge such as technology to make paradigm shift.
The coordinator said in 2016, the SEA-Hub programme identified secondary schools as the ideal places to engage young people who are interested in learning entrepreneurial skills, noting that outcome of efforts made in that regard has proved the decision right.
Currently, SEA-Hub is working in four states of the federation, involving eighteen thousand students of secondary schools in forty-six Local Government Areas of the States.
