Selection Nigeria
Co-Creation Hub
Co-Creation Hub is the largest Technology Innovation Hub in Africa. In 2010, we started out as Nigeria’s premier innovation centre dedicated to accelerating the application of social capital and technology for economic prosperity in Nigeria. We believe youth education is critical to drive our vision. We also understand the importance of building a sustainable tech-based skill acquisition platform that supports the technology ecosystem and leads to decent employment. This is why with our project – SAIL Innovation Lab, we are creating a community innovation space for young people to learn and explore, with the long-term goal of addressing youth unemployment.
The Problem
Lagos State, the demographic we are targeting with our project, has a population size of approximately 16 million with 16.8% within the age bracket of 18-35. Our research revealed that youth in Lagos are faced with high unemployment due to lack of employability skills, job opportunities, skills training and mentorship. This is due to the lack of a growth environment which fosters youths’ socio-economic development.
The rate of youth unemployment in Nigeria is very high, with 55.4% either unemployed or underemployed. This rate highlights the severity of youth unemployment in Nigeria. Also, Young women encounter more obstacles when searching for decent jobs, with a 26.6% unemployment rate in 2018, as opposed to the 20.3% rate for young men.
This is the reason our project was initiated. The project aims to reduce youth unemployment by offering technology skills training and job placement opportunities, with a particular focus on employment for young women.
The Solution
Our project is centred around the creation of a community innovation space. The goal of this space is to create employment opportunities, inspire grassroot innovations, and foster a collaborative ecosystem. We will create training programs to address the skills mismatch between young job seekers and the tech industry labor market. We will also prioritize the training and employment of women, aiming to have 50% young women in the entire cohort through our program.
The Technology Business Acceleration Program and the Tech Talent Development Program aim to create job opportunities in digitally/tech-enabled services for the youth and improve their access to 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 ecosystem. Additionally, the support from CFYE will enhance our capabilities to design and implement an effective communication strategy to reach a wide audience of youth.