Selection Nigeria
Nature’s Bounty Health Products T/A ReelFruit
The ‘ReelSkills’ project will upskill Nigerian youth (esp women) with practical, industry demand-led training for careers in the most valuable sectors in Agri-processing. We will place 800 youth in decent jobs over a 3-year period. Success is youth employment, creating career opportunities and increased lifetime earning potential
The Problem
The biggest barrier to youth employment in the agri-processing sector is the mismatch of skills required by SMEs versus what youth possess. Over and above this, SMEs have limited capital and time to train young people, which results in them being overlooked as ideal candidates. There are few options that exist to offer youth the relevant skills which companies need, based on practical, updated skills needed in the sector. Existing solutions are often too theoretical and don’t address job matching challenges.
While the Agriculture sector employs over 50% of the national workforce in Nigeria (according to the National Bureau of Statistics), the majority of these jobs are temporary, low-paying, and low-skilled jobs that occur on the farm. The opportunity to create decent jobs in this sector rests in higher value chain activities, which require more complex skills and competencies.
The Solution
Our training solution is grounded on the market needs from growth-stage private SMEs (who create the most jobs in any economy), but focused on the key sub-sectors where most jobs are created in “Processing and Packaging”, “Field Sales and Distribution” and “Administration”.
This project combines a unique approach of scalable tiered training our target group by identifying their interests and placing them into one of three training tracks: “Sales/Marketing Track”, “Administrative Track” and “Production track”
ReelFruit will leverage its experience and input in the curriculum based on 9 years of operation across the agribusiness value chain. ReelFruit will offer its operations for an on-the-job training component. Through its expansion, ReelFruit will create 200 direct jobs over a 3-year period across its entire operation. We will also target training 100 youth towards the entrepreneurship track to begin their own businesses. Temploy will deploy soft skills and computer-based training as well as match 346 beneficiaries to jobs in the sector. Made culture will be responsible for overall project management, monitoring, and evaluation.
Additionality
The CYFE’s support will help us scale the model that we have implemented over the years, and also help us create something that we can productize, replicate and scale to the other firms within the space, which will have huge compound effects of raising the overall quality of factory and operational staff in the sector. ReelFruit has invested a lot of time and money over the years to develop and upskill employees but lacks the capacity to scale this for its expansion as well as share this knowledge to develop the sector. The company has secured $2M in private investment for core business expansion of the factory and operations, which presents a need to upskill over 200+ staff in the next couple of years. Thus, support to train and upskill these employees will support the investment but also increase the chances of business growth, which will lead to increased job creation for youth and women. The support also allows the consortium to “productize” this training which can be affordably deployed to other companies, especially other Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) who would not be able to otherwise afford the training. The youth who receive the training as a result of the funding will be a net benefit to the agribusiness ecosystem, as they will be more valuable to employers and add to the growth of said companies.
