The Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme (SURE-P) is set to tackle youth unemployment through its Graduate Internship Scheme (GIS), its chairman, Ambassador Christopher Kolade, said yesterday.
Kolade, who said job creation was a major concern of President Goodluck Jonathan's administration, said GIS, which he described as one of the many interventions of SURE-P to create jobs for Nigerian youths, "has the mandate to create 50,000 jobs for graduates annually".
The chairman, represented by the SURE-P Technical Assistant, Community Services, Women and Youth Employment, Mr Emeka Ekpunobi, spoke at a sensitisation forum for stakeholders in Ado-Ekiti, the Ekiti State capital.
He said: "The scheme targets making most Nigerian graduates more employable through training and mentoring.
"Over the years, employers of labour in the country have lamented that many Nigerian graduates are not employable. It is hoped that SURE-P, through GIS, will address this issue. One year down the line in the implementation of this scheme, a lot of lessons have been learnt with quite a number of challenges encountered."
Under the scheme, graduates will be placed in profit and non-profit makingorganisations as well as selected government agencies for one-year internship whereby the interns are expected to acquire professional skills, training and experience to improve their job-placement opportunities.
Speaking at the forum, GIS Project Director, Mr. Peter Papka, who said about 40 million Nigerians needed employment, described SURE-P and its GIS as creations of government's concern "about this high unemployment rate and its readiness to do everything possible to reverse it".
Papka, who was represented by GIS Assistant Director, Mr. Fola Jimoh, appealed to unemployed graduates in Ekiti State to key into the scheme to enable them benefit from the effort to make them employable and self-sufficient.
He said: "In Ekiti State, 58 organisations have registered and 13 have been approved to take interns. Also, out of the 4,084 graduates that have registered in the state, 46 have been matched to firms and only five have been hired".
According to him, one of the challenges of graduate unemployment is the inability of the system to absorb the nearly 300,000 graduates churned out by the nation's universities and other tertiary institutions yearly.
Ekiti State SURE-P Coordinator, Hon Femi Akinyemi, said no fewer than 30,000 youths had been employed under the community services of the programmes, which he said had translated to injection of over N150 million to the state economy.
National Mirror