DigitalMarketingSkill Institute

The Problem

Before COVID-19, Nigeria’s unemployment rate was already sky-high at 23.1% while underemployment stood at 16% according to a 2018 report by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). In May 2019, Minister of Labour and Employment, Chris Ngige said the federal government forecast an unemployment rate of 33.5% by 2020. However, the situation has gotten worse — Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, said the government was anticipating 39.4 million job losses by December 2020 due to the pandemic.

Also, our research also shows that nursing mothers are the most affected in job losses due to pregnancy and maternity leave and this is evident in our survey of 148 young women where 115 out 145 agreed that a major barrier they face is losing their jobs because they were pregnant.

According to the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics, there are over 17.4 million small and medium businesses and due to the COVID-19 pandemic effect on their sales, these businesses need to hire people with digital marketing skills to move, manage and grow their sales strategy online. This has created a massive demand for well-trained digital marketing professionals while there is a shortage of digital marketing professionals to take up this new job in the new digital economy. This fact was attested to by the survey we carried out between 94 business owners, where we discovered that 77.7% said “moving their sales online was the most important action they took when the COVID-19 Pandemic emerged while 97.9% said that selling online is very important to their business.

The Solution

This project will generate revenue in 2 proven and viable ways that have been tested with a Graduate Internship Program we ran in 2015 in partnership with the Boulos Group, where we trained graduates in digital marketing skills and placed them as internships in Boulos Group of Companies and other organisations like the Nigeria-Britain Association with an average salary of ₦80,000. Boulos Group paid us to match them with the interns and the interns paid for the training after they got hired by Boulos Group of Companies.

The business model of the proposed project is going to be based on the “Pay tuition when you’re hired” model using the “Income Sharing” principle. What this means is that the programme will be attractive to the beneficiaries (young women) as they would not be making any financial commitment until they are hired or they start to earn an income as being self-employed.

After they are matched into a job, they will pay tuition in small monthly payments if they are earning above ₦60,000 monthly.

The project is built to get young women high-paying jobs in the digital economy with zero upfront intuition until they have started their new job. Once they start their new job, they pay the tuition in small monthly payments.

The job-matching platform makes this trackable. This will aid the sustainability of the program after the CFYE’s funding has ended and eliminated barriers to participation from these young women.

This ensures we are invested in these young women’s futures, especially because if we do not match them to decent jobs that pay above ₦60,000 monthly, we do not earn an income. This would also help ensure we give them the necessary support they need to remain employed.

Additionality 

With CFYE investment, we will be able to scale the impact of our proven and tested solutions to reduce unemployment in Nigeria by training and empowering young women in less privileged communities (especially nursing and single mothers) with high-income digital marketing skills while matching them through our newly developed job-matching platform to secure decent jobs, create more jobs through entrepreneurship, and improve jobs in the digital marketing field which has been male-dominated.

This will allow young women to meet their personal and career aspirations in the new digital economy.

The CFYE grant and technical support will add a lot of value to the proposed project. These value points are quite vital and cannot be dissociated from the core aim of the project itself.

1. Speed of execution: With a timeline of 3 years to train and empower young women to decent jobs, the support of CFYE will be of immense help in achieving all the goals. In the course of doing this project, there are three major tasks that must be carried out (Recruiting, Onboarding, Training, and Matching). The CFYE grant will play a vital role here.
2. Acquisition of project’s resources and costs subsidisation: The project requires our organisation to acquire more resources that will allow us to serve the pool of people to be trained and matched with employers. In the course of this project, we would need to acquire a lot of capital- and labour-intensive resources. The CFYE grant would be helpful in fast-tracking this acquisition process and subsidise running costs.