NBTI unveils entrepreneurship scheme to empower Youth Corps members

Poisedto bolster job creation and wealth generation among the youth, the National Board for Technology Incubation, NBTI, has introduced an entrepreneurship scheme called Youth Corps Business Empowerment Initiative, YCBEI. The scheme is designed to train and empower not less than 300 Youth Corps members on entrepreneurial skills at the end of everyservice year nationwide under the programme.

Justifying the initiative, the Director-General of the Agency, Engr. Dr. Mohammed Jibrin, said the move apart from creating a new window for job creation in the country, the scheme is expected to expedite the country’s economic growth at the long run.According to him, each of the Board’s 29 Technology Incubation Centres, TICs, and six extension offices spread across the country is to train no fewer than eight youth corps members accordingly posted their for their primary assignment, to save university and polytechnic graduates from roaming the streets in search of non-existent jobs, and launch them into gainful self-employment and entrepreneurship.

Speaking at the maiden training organized for Batch C of the Youth Corps members posted to NBTI headquarters, Abuja, the Coordinator of the programme, Engr. Mike Amonye, said that henceforth, every Youth Corps member posted to the headquarters and the TICs would be requested to conceive a business enterprise in his or her area of interest, preferably from the area of their undergraduate research work and accordingly, produce a bankable business plan, which would pass through a process of scrutiny and evaluation to render it commercially viable and, consequently, approved.

Amonye said after the business plan had been approved, the Youth Corps member will be expected to establish a business out of the enterprise he or she had conceived, “but whatever business enterprise chosen and conceived must be innovative, so that any youth corps member who is able to produce a good proposal can, at the end of his or her service year, start the business either as an incubatee at one of our centres in his orher state of origin or any chosen location near any of the Technology Incubation Centres”.