The Industrial Training Fund (ITF) is collaborating with the Nigerian Employees Consultative Association (NECA) in the full implementation of the Technical Skills Development Project (TSDP) under which it will promote Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) in addressing the country’s worrisome unemployment statistics.
Director-general, ITF, Sir Joseph Ari, said this when he received in audience, the new director-general of NEC, Mr Wale-Smatt Oyerinde, in Abuja, yesterday.
Ari said it has become incumbent on the country to change its outdated education system to integrate technical vocational education and training in its curriculum.
“Unemployment is rising daily and we want more Nigerians to embrace skills acquisition because white collar jobs are becoming almost non-existent,” he added.
Also speaking, the NECA DG assured that NECA will work with Fund in deepening the TSDP programme, adding that most developed economies are driven by the technical abilities of their citizens and Nigeria will not be an exception.
He explained that the TSDP is a joint initiative by the ITF and NECA designed to promote the availability of middle-level manpower with the appropriate technical and vocational skills to meet the identified needs of industries in Nigeria, adding that “Our country is faced with huge challenges and we need to join hands together to tackle them.
“We have an unemployment rate of about 33 per cent and when you add the underemployment rate which is about 20 per cent, then we know that it has become imperative to deepen our collaboration particularly in the area of the TSDP programme.”
