British Council, Stakeholders Move to Reduce Unemployment Surge

Ayodeji Ake

The British Council with major education stakeholders in Nigeria yesterday  had extensive discussion session on the need to inject practical entrepreneurship in university curriculum to produce graduate-employers to reduce the surge of unemployment in Nigeria.

The one-day national  onference was organised to engage with key stakeholders within the Nigerian education ecosystem on global best practice for the design and pedagogy, assessment , and partnerships that improves the entrepreneurial and innovation capacity of universities.

Speaking at the event, the Country Director, British Council, Lucy Pearson, noted the programme  is important to reshape the tertiary education, turning graduates into employers and not employees by equipping them with entrepreneurial skills to perform better.

He said: “For very many years, British Council has been in Nigeria for 79 years and across every socials we move focus very much on education, the primary education though to secondary and tertiary education. So we have been building wall over decades,

“The world is changing, while the traditional education will continue to be important, it’s important we do partnership around entrepreneurship and innovation for students to develop the 21st century skills, the creative thinking, ability to take risks, make mistakes and learn from the mistakes and to develop the Nigeria’s property, create opportunity to jobs and employability and more prosperous Nigeria in the future.

“The end result we hope to achieve is that we brought in policy makers, representatives of the federal and state governments, academics to exchange ideas, learn from each other and then take effective action to implement the things we have discussed.

“We hope to start with the young people, get back the entrepreneurial spirit and look into the curriculum from primary to high education.

Speaking in  the same vein of undergraduate empowerment through entrepreneurship, the Acting  Executive Secretary, National Universities Commission, Chris Maiyaki, said the programme  was  a welcome development to restructure the university curriculum to tackle unemployment.

“This programme  is one flagship of British Council as part of their public diplomacy to engage national authorities such as: the National Universities Commission, (NUC) who are by law, regulates the University education.

“The issue of entrepreneurship education is yet another clarion call for NUC, British Council and all other stakeholders to draw out attention on the imperative of bequeathing and the entreprenurial skills, that ability of the graduate to account for his certificate by demonstrating those digital skills, hard and soft skills that will make them the employers of labour rather than depending on the government.

“We have had to be confronted with mismatch, army of unemployed people and the work spaces are dwindling by the day. It behoves the government and the authorities rejig the curriculum to harness the best practices and to create the ecosystem, that enabling environment for the Nigerian graduates to be much more useful to themselves, to change the mindset and make employability a value system of our educational experience,” he said.