The Federal Government, through the Industrial Training Fund, has commenced upskilling training for five million youths nationwide under the Skill Up Artisan Program.
The Director-General, Dr Afiz Oluwatoyin, said that the president had given the agency the mandate to up-skill artisans across the 774 local government areas in the country.
The DG disclosed this at the inaugural meeting on the implementation of the skill-up artisan’s programme for executives of enlisted training centres in Abuja.
Oluwatoyin in a statement on Tuesday noted that the cardinal objective of the SUPA programme was to lift Nigerian artisans to international standards, where they could favourably compete with artisans from other nations as well as get adequately remunerated for their outputs.
He said the program would be carried out in phases of 100,000 artisans per batch.
“Today we are launching the SUPA programme for 5 million artisans across the country. However, we cannot take all of them at the same time, so we will start the pilot phase with 100,000 artisans.
“We have lined up skill acquisition programmes in 20 different areas, which had been on our website when the registration began in January till March this year. We are expecting that the pilot set will commence before the end of this month, and we will publish the names of successful candidates that have been screened.
“After training, they will be licensed because we want to have a scenario where every artisan is licensed, and whoever does not have, the government will know the necessary steps to take,” Oluwatoyin explained.
According to him, the inaugural meeting was convened to create a mutually beneficial partnership between ITF and enlisted Skills Training Centers to transform the skills acquisition space in Nigeria.
He stated, “We want to up-skill Nigerian artisans to international standard, and after up-skilling them, we don’t want a situation whereby after training them we just leave them; we want them to get jobs.
“The jobs are there, but the quality is not there. That’s why Ghanaians will come here and succeed and take our money home, the same thing with the Indians and the Lebanese.
“Over the last seven months, my team and I have worked assiduously to design and undertake the preparatory work for a specialized program known as Skill Up Artisan to respond to the technical manpower crisis faced by the country as well as escalate vocational training to defeat quackery. In the long run, this program aims to entrench professionalism thereby improving the prosperity of players in the artisanry space.”
He further said the training would be in Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba and Pidgin as every Nigerian understands at least one of these languages.
The SUPA initiative is a collaborative effort to retrain and certify 20 million artisans in the next five years as part of efforts to boost the blue-collar job sector.
Through the programme, the government also plans to send about 14,000 artisans to the United Arab Emirates as part of a partnership project between both nations.