Kaduna feeding programe aims at 100,000 jobs :Chamber

Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI)

The Nigerian Youth Chamber of Commerce (NYCC) said on Friday that the 16,000 jobs created by the Kaduna State Government through its school feeding programme could be multiplied to 100, 000.

The chamber’s Acting Director-General, Mr Isaac Udem, said this in Kaduna.

Udem said that the chamber had already written a proposal and would soon submit to the Kaduna State Government on how it could be achieved.

“For example, the food vendors have been organised into cooperatives. All the state needs to do is to make entrepreneurs out of the vendors.

“Empower them with the needed skills to pool resources together, attract additional support from Bank of Industries or Bank of Agriculture for them and the cooperatives could create massive jobs.

“One of them could go into tomato production and supply to other cooperatives, another could go into egg production and others could produce beans, yams and all other inputs needed for the programe.

“Once this is achieved, it would translate into massive jobs for huge unemployed youths in the state,” he said.

He further said that the chamber had also advised the government on micro enterprise pack system.

He explained that the system was a methodology of clustering businesses together to share common facility and easily access funds from funding institutions.

“The state can cluster information technology entrepreneurs, tailors, phone repairers and other business and group them into cooperatives and get them fund through different sources for expansion and sustainability.”

He described the chamber as a business service development provider, centered on youths and placed 19 out of 25 national business service providers in the country.

“We train, provide information, organize business clinic to talk to business men and women and educate them on how to make their businesses flourish.

“When we discover challenges, we make proposal to governments on how to tackle the challenges,” he said.

Udem added that the chamber had so far trained officials of the National Directorate of Employment (NDE) in the 19 northern states on train-the-trainer in entrepreneurship.

“We just concluded same training for NDE officials in the 17 southern states in Delta today (Oct. 7),” he said.