By Ade Adedeji, Abuja
The Minister of Youth and Sports Development, Sunday Dare, has revealed that the ministry trained over 15,000 youth on digital skills throughout the COVID-19 lockdown and now, working with the IBM under the digital nation and the ministry’s Digital Youth Nigeria Initiative.
The minister disclosed this when he appeared before the House committee youth for the defence of 2021 budget proposal.
He said that while the 2021 capital budget proposal was higher than last year, it was grossly inadequate to finance the maintenance of five national stadia, the mini sports centres across the country and the youth development centres.
Dare noted that the quest of the ministry to progress with the concessioning of the national stadium, Lagos and Athletes’ hostel of the Moahood Abiola Stadium, Abuja has been hampered due to paucity of funds.
The minister stated: “The ministry trained over 15,000 youth on digital skills throughout the Covid-19 lockdown and now, working with the IBM under the digital nation and the ministry’s digital youth Nigeria initiative
“We also realised that we needed to leverage in our Public-Private Partnership considering that we don’t have the kind of funding that we need. We have a Memorandums of Understanding (MoU) with IBM, Microsoft, recently we signed with Google.
“Google will train 500,000 youth for free through a platform they are setting up. Google will provide $3.7 million for Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) that are youth-driven based on a database put together by the ministry. We have an MoU with Wilco to train over 5,000 youth in digital metering and then we have a partnership with Guineas Nigeria. Not all of them are fully activated but we have signed MoUs and which should be on the way shortly.
The minister equally revealed that the ministry has received over 1 million application that has for the National Youth Intervention Fund, saying the processing has commenced.
Speaking, the chairman of the committee, Yemi Adaramodu, said considering the events of the past few weeks, especially with the #EndSARS protests, the budget of the ministry should be the first of it kind.
According to him, The budget of the ministry that will handle youth matter should be the first of its kind in Nigeria and when I look at what is submitted here, even the budget performance of this current year- 50%, 40%,35% and then we want the youth to be taken care of, is it not going to amount to lip service?
He added, “This government has a lot for the youth, so many programmes but how are these programmes being run?. When you have programme for the youth and the ministry in charge of the youth is not in charge of that programme or be part of that programme, definitely, how are you going to reach the beneficiaries.”
On his part, a member of the committee, Hon. Ifeanyi Momah, was of the opinion considering the event of the last one month, it is expedient to address the issues that youths have raised, adding that the committee cannot be accused of budget padding if the ministry’s budget is increased to accommodate the demands of the youth.
He frowned at the zero allocation to the youth parliament, insisting that it must be well funded.