“Make Kids Love Skills ” – Report warns

-Make Kids Love Skills – Report warns

By Abolaji Adebayo

Unless kids are made to fall in love with skills, the society has to live with killings and other crimes committed by unemployed youths.

This is the kernel of the nut cracked by experts reviewing a recent report on the worrisome attitude of children in and out of school wh can’t do much with their brains yet to hostile to working with their hands.

The report says despite the governmen’s provision of skill acquisition centres totrain youths and empower them to be self-employed it needs the buy-in of youths inundated with get rich ideas and celebrity stereotypes to work.

To achieve the purpose, more teachers of technical skills are needed in the schools and parents are encouraged to support their kids.

However, the entrepreneurial skill acquisition policy advocated by the government and other economic stakeholders may suffer set back as many students are not ready to key into the policy while the parents are not encouraging their children to imbibe the policy.

A study carried out across Oshodi-Isolo Local Government Area conducted by a community based educational and research non-governmental organisation EducationForAll, a division of EduFountain Consulting Ltd, in conjunction with Echonews Newspaper has revealed that few students undergo vocational training in addition to their academic pursuit asgainst entrepreneurial policy of the government.

Questionnaire was the major tool used to gather primary information from the students as 1,200 questionnaires were distributed among the students who were randomly selected across Oshodi, Isolo and Ejigbo while oral interview and published materials served as sources of secondary information. In all, 800 male respondents and 700 female respondents, mainly secondary school students, were surveyed to represent the entire students in the community.

Out of the 1,200 students who were selected to fill the questionnaires, only 18% which is 216 respondents majorly students in senior classes indicated that they enrolled for apprenticeship in one vocational centre or the other during the long holiday; 65% said they enrolled for lesson/tutorial classes while the remaining 17% did neither.

For the male students, barbing is the prominent artisanship aside computer training they enrolled into as many of them said it would be easy for them to set up and that they could make money on barbing even when they get admission into higher institutions. 28% of the 60 male respondents learned barbing while few respondents indicated learning other handiworks.

Hairdressing and make-up caught the interest of the female respondents being the vocation that is relatively making wave in the society as 43% of the 40 male respondent indicated that they enrolled for hairdressing and make-up. A significant percentage of them also engaged in fashion designing and catering businesses.

One of the most engaged vocations is computer training especially as there were various organisations within Oshodi-Isolo which organised free computer training programmes for the students.

For instance, more than 50 students enrolled for the free 8-week computer training organised by an NGO in Isolo, Opas for Africa for the duration of their holiday as many others enrolled for other vocational and skills acquisition programmes organised by Catalyst Vocational Institute in Ejigbo as the students were trained on catering, gele and makeup, Ankara craft, decorations, hair dressing, barbing and others.

The students who participated in those programmes were not part of the respondents in this research as the respondents were randomly selected at various places.

From the analysis of the result, it was evident that not many youths keyed into vocational scheme while majority of those who learn handiworks right from school preferred to take up the ones that do not require much energy as none of the respondent said they enrolled for vocations such as bricklaying, mechanic, furniture making and the like.

Experts believe that youths’ participation in handiworks would create more jobs and reduce crimes in the society.

According to the President of Catalyst Vocation, Mr. Adewunmi Olugbenga, artisanship is capable of rescuing street youths, ghetto youths and the destitute from gangsterism, drug abuse, crime/violence and other vicious involvements that mar the social, cultural and economic development of countries.

He added that vocations address unemployment by providing youth with self-sustaining job skills