ITF DG says equipping Nigerians with technical skills acquisition enduring solution to unemployment

The Director-General of the Industrial Training Fund(ITF), Sir Joseph Ari, says equipping Nigerians with technical skills acquisition is an enduring solution to the spate of unemployment in the country.

Ari stated this on Tuesday in Jos at a media forum organised by the Correspondents Chapel of the Nigeria Union Journalists(NUJ), Plateau State Council.

He said the skills were meant to equip many Nigerians for employability and entrepreneurship.

He observed that Nigerians were averse to skills acquisition, but that skills acquisition could create more jobs and reduce to the barest minimum the issue of unemployment confronting the nation.

He said that the Federal Government had recently unveiled the 5-year National Development Plan (2021-2025) to replace the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (EGRP).

The director-general stated that the plan projected the creation of 21 million jobs, with 35 million Nigerians to be lifted out of poverty.

According to him, the ITF as the leading human capital development institution in Nigeria, has commenced the process of repositioning its programmes and activities to effectively prepare the nation’s workforce in line with the Fund’s mandate of developing a pool of qualified Nigerians to man the public and private sectors of the national economy.

He also said that the ITF was committed to doing the same with equal or even greater impact, given the centrality of human capital development to the actualisation of the Plan, as it did during the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (EGRP) when it trained hundreds of thousands of Nigerians that are today gainfully employed or are even employers of labour.

Ari said that is inline with the mandate, the Fund recently convened a half-year and Third Quarter Review Meeting to re-evaluate its targets, re-prioritise its objectives and allocation of resources to ensure that its service offerings were tailored toward driving the actualisation of the human capital element of the National Development Plan.