ITF tackles unemployment

•Creates 36 Skills Centres

TO address unemployment, the Industrial training Fund (ITF) has established 36 skill acquisition centres to provide jobs for Nigerians, the Director-General of the Fund, Joseph Ari, has said

Ari, who made the stated this during an interactive session with  reporters to mark the golden jubilee of the Fund at the headquarters in Jos, said the number of the poor nations all over world have resorted to skill acquisition and use it as a vehicle of equipping their citizenry with competitive skills for entrepreneurship and employability.

“The reason is simple, for even the over 36 intervention programmes we have introduced. We discovered that one intervention programme gives birth to both direct and indirect jobs and place alongside the impossibility of acquiring or getting paid employment as skill acquisition has becomes an answer to the absence of white collar jobs.

“The reason being that if you provide skills to people, the person becomes an employer by bringing more people into number of those that have indirect jobs created and add value to the economy.

‘‘They become employers of their own. The way unemployment had risen, we need all hands among all agencies of government to come together to institutionise TIBETT,” Ari said

He noted that unemployment could not be totally checked given the population increase, but warned that leaving the youths without skills or manpower would create a lot of vices such as banditry, kidnapping and prostitution.

“It is for this reason that ITF sees skill acquisition as a universal currency of the 21st century and most sustainable vehicle for job creation as well as poverty reduction, ” he added.

He added that as a result of its training capacity and network,  ITF has been able to identify through research and used facilities such as the tracers studies, a tracking system that follows up on beneficiaries.