The Director General, Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency, SMEDAN, Dikko Umaru Radda urged has appealed to the federal government to make entrepreneurship part of Nigerian educational curriculum.
Dikko made this appeal at the 2019 National School Entrepreneurship Exhibition and Award in Abuja, in partnership with SAGE Nigeria, stating that this will ensure the children are well equipped with different skills before graduating from secondary school.
He said, “The impact this will create is for them to have the spirit of entrepreneurship in them so when they finish school they will not start looking for job, they should be business owners, create wealth and support the economy.
“We are pushing for entrepreneurship as part of the Nigerian curriculum, even though the government is really becoming conscious of the importance of entrepreneurship in schools now, they are really doing something about it and Smedan is encouraging the government on ensuring entrepreneurship is fully part of the Nigerian educational curriculum.
“We started this programme given the fact that there is need for us to expand the scope of our activities into schools in Nigeria because there is need to inculcate this kind of spirit to the pupils of primary and secondary schools, so they can imbibe the spirit of entrepreneurship and should not be looking for white collar jobs when they are through with school.
“SMEDAN intends to make them masters of themselves because they already have the spirit of entrepreneurship in them. Presently they Nigerian curriculum does not encourage entrepreneurship. What we are doing now and want to continually do is to introduce entrepreneurship into our educational system.
“On status of the conditional grand scheme, it is ongoing and about thirteen states have benefitted so far. On training the trainers SMEDAN sponsored it in selected schools and we are doing it in partnership with the ministry of education across the states, though we are working with the ministry that indicated interest, while SAGE is the ones preparing students for the global competition.”
What we are doing now is that we train the trainer, train the students and bring the students to Abuja, accommodate the students and feed them then the competition will take place. The best among the students are the ones we will carry to the world competition, all this is done under the world SAGE, in all the countries they have their branches.
The first and second teams will earn the right to represent Nigeria at the 2019 SAGE World Cup in United State of America USA from 8-13 August 2019 with participation of over 30 countries including USA, Canada, China, South Korea, Singapore, South Africa , Russia, Ghana, Pakistan, Philippines, Ireland, Japan, Isrea, Iran etc.
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