By Emma Okonji

ALX Africa is collaborating with NGOs, training foundations and development partners from across Nigeria to build employability skills among Nigerian youth and to turn their investments into profitable and measurable outcomes.

To achieve this, ALX Africa hosted a roundtable in Lagos, that brought together,

foundations, NGOs and development partners from across Nigeria to discuss how ideas could be developed, nurtured and implemented to achieve measurable results.

The forum was able to put different training organisations side-by-side, to honestly share what’s working, and what’s not working in terms of project implementation and also to learn from people tackling the same problems from different angles. ALX Africa is known for training young Africans in the skills and digital economy needs, from Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data, to virtual assistants, creative work and entrepreneurship.

Speaking at the forum, the Regional Manager, Western Central Africa at ALX Africa, Ruby Igwe, stressed the need for employable skills among Nigerian youth, adding that there is huge investment going into youth skills and employability in Nigeria. She however said too many programmes don’t deliver the jobs and change their promise. According to her, projects don’t fail at the funding stage, but they sometimes loss it at the middle stage in the manner they are delivered.

Igwe said ALX Africa would fix the challenge by positioning ALX as a technical, delivery, and implementation partner for any organisation or training group that is looking to deliver youth programme at scale.

“We are confident about fixing the challenge because ALX Africa has delivered youth programmes at scale. We have trained over 374,000 young people, and among this number, over 258,000 have found their ways into jobs, while over 60,000 of them have found their ways into entrepreneurship. So, we are the best people to deliver anyone’s programme. We also think that together we can go far, because through collaborate, we can increase our capacity to deliver more for the young people,” Igwe said.

At the forum, the participants were divided into groups to discuss how best to achieve employability skills and successful project implementation.

Participants identified project implementation and motivation as key challenges.

According to them majority of today’s youth are not interested in learning skills, because they desire short cuts to make quick money.

They therefore advised that youth should be incentivised during training to catch their attention.

Some participants were of the view that values such as patience, honesty, hard-work and integrity must be thought to the youth because times are changing but values are not changing.

They also stressed the need to build confidence in youth that would enable them take the necessary risks in project implementation.

They advised training partners to be honest in giving information to youth without misleading them into believing that a particular tech skill can turn them into billionaires overnight.

Participants also spoke about the need for ownership and accountability in project implementation that could boost the moral of team mates to participate fully in project implementation.