The Industrial Training Fund (ITF) under the auspices of the National Industrial Skill Development (NISDP) has trained a total of 250,000 Rivers youths in various entrepreneurial skills in the last two years.
Making this known during the closing ceremony of the NISDP in Port Harcourt, recently, the Director-General of ITF, Sir Joseph N. Ari, said the 10,000 Rivers youths trained so far are part of a total of 11,000 Nigerian youths trained in skills in line with the Federal Government’s policy of wealth creation.
Ari, who was represented at the occasion by the Director of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) of ITF, Mr. Dickson Onuoha, said the ITF was committed to skills acquisition because it was the solution to combating unemployment.
“Our commitment to skills acquisition is based on the fact that it is the most sustainable solution to combating unemployment, reducing poverty and youth restiveness in the country.
“It is incontrovertible that any society that neglects development of its human capital is bound to retrogress in terms of growth and development,” he said.
He explained that NISDP was fashioned with the Taiwan experience, which developed its economy to become the fourth largest financial reserves in the world with human capital, even when it did not have key mineral resources like Nigeria.
According to him, Taiwan has “no oil, no iron ore, no forest, no diamonds, no gold, just a few small deposits of coal and natural gas”.
In spite of this, “they developed the habits and culture of honing their people’s skills, which turns out to be the most valuable and only true renewable resource in the world today”.
He explained that in the last phase of the training, 250 indigenes of Rivers State benefited.
The training was in welding and fabrication, plumbing and pipe-fitting, tailoring, aluminium fabrication and installation, tiling, plaster of Paris (POP), as well as photography.