Entrepreneurship education in Nigeria

The reaching of an agreement between Bank of Industry and The National Youth Service Corps, according to the chief executive officers of the two bodies, was a step to inculcate in the corps members entrepreneurial skills and culture which will make them to be self-reliant after their service year. However, I consider this type of arrangement belated for the youths that have spent four or five years in the universities and polytechnics. Training a large group of youth under the same banner of NYSC by BoI will make the programme ineffective in tackling unemployment and improving on the economy. The best way to foster entrepreneurial skills acquisition and development amongst the youth is to establish a long-lasting connection between the bank and the respective universities, polytechnics and colleges of education. This will drive a strong desire for change in attitude of the students and youths with the existence of varieties of incentives for students and youths with sound business plans. The missing link between BoI and educational institutions stalls the effectiveness of BoI and also on the otherhand hinders feedback to the educational institutions. Involvement of BoI in training of students in the higher institutions will create a dependable platform and also increase the knowledge base of the students about business establishment and management. This is due to the fact that BoI, over the years, have interacted with youths through their business plan presentation to access loan facilities. It is an untold fact that the bank would have found varieties of inadequacies in the business plans presented by a majority of the graduates. This now makes it necessary to bring the bank into the education environment in order to present these inadequacies to the notice of academic experts so that a strategic, integrated and holistic approach will be developed to tackle the shortfalls. Emphatically, this will go a long way in the training of competent, resourceful, dynamic, innovative and energetic young entrepreneurs who will tactically give birth to innovative and technical mechanisms to tackle unemployment and raise the economic potential of the Nigerian people. We cannot get our economic growth and development right, if we neglect entrepreneurship education. We must intensify all the available means, energy, opportunities and procedures using the available resources to adequately connect the young graduates with entrepreneurial skills which will effectively navigate them across the space of unemployment. Government at all levels via their ministries, agencies and bodies ought to develop a practicable and workable collaboration with institutions of higher learning in providing effective and pragmatic training of the greatest number of the students. With the complex level of unemployment in Nigeria, a functional entrepreneurship remains the only remarkable and dependable strategy for solving the problem