Selection Nigeria
Co Creation Hub
We are a social innovation centre dedicated to accelerating the application of social capital and technology. We think youth education is important, as well as we understand the importance of building a sustainable educational value system that leads to decent employment. This is why, with our project Senator Abiru Innovation Lab (SAIL) we want to create a community innovation space for young people to learn and explore, with the long-term goal of fighting youth unemployment.
The Problem
Lagos State, the demographic we are targeting with our project, has a population size of approximately 1,041,166 with a 16,8% age bracket of 18-35. Our research has revealed that youth in Lagos are faced with high unemployment due to a lack of employability skills, job opportunities, skills training and mentorship. This is due to the lack of a growth environment which fosters the youths socio-economic development.
The population of job seekers in Nigeria grows everyday. In general, youth unemployment in Nigeria is very high at a rate of 55,4% are either unemployed or underemployed. These rates underscore the fact that youth unemployment in Nigeria is a critical problem. (Young) women face additional barriers seeking for (decent) employment, compared to the 20,3% of young men that were unemployed, this rate was 26,6% in 2018 for young women. This rates are largely driven by early family formation and lower rates of enrolment in schools.
This is why we have initiated our project. To fight youth unemployment by providing them with Our project technology skills training and job placement, with a special emphasis on the employment of young women.
The Solution
With our project we want to create a community innovation space. The goal of this space would be creating employment opportunities, inspiring grass-root innovations and building an ecosystem of partnerships. We will also create training programs to reduce the skills mismatch between the tech industry labour marker and skills of young job seekers. With this program we will put emphasis on the training and employment of women aiming at 50% of young women for the whole cohort.
Both programmes we will develop, the Technology business acceleration programme, and the Tech Talent Development programme, will encourage the creation of work opportunities in digitally/tech-enabled services and improve youth access to job opportunities in newer, non-traditional careers.
In total, we will focus on supporting 1560 talents to access and be matched with decent tech-enabled jobs over a period of two years. The technology business acceleration programme will support 120 early-stage start-ups to create 240 new jobs, and to improve 120 already existing jobs from 18 start-ups that we have previously supported.
Additionality
With the support of CFYE we are able to scale up our impact to improve, match and create employment opportunities for 1920 youths in Lagos over a period of two years. The support also enables us to scale our impact across Lagos, instead of just Lagos East. It allows us to explore the new opportunities for employment within our sectors ecosystem. Additionally, the support from CFYE will enhance our capabilities to design and implement and effective communication strategy reaching to a wide audience of youth.