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With Okorie Uguru
In a decisive move to reposition culture as a national economic asset, the President of the Association of Tourism Practitioners of Nigeria (ATPN), Prince Femi Fadina, has officially launched the ATPN National Youth Cultural Initiative, a bold framework aimed at transforming Nigeria’s cultural heritage into structured enterprise for young people.
Unveiled before tourism stakeholders, youth leaders, and cultural advocates, the initiative signals a strategic shift from informal creative engagement to institutionalized cultural entrepreneurship.
“Our vision is clear,” Prince Fadina declared at the launch. “To institutionalize cultural entrepreneurship as the structured pathway for youth economic empowerment and generational wealth creation.”
The initiative seeks to equip Nigerian youth with vocational skills in heritage tourism, cultural content development, identity product creation, and enterprise governance — ensuring that culture moves beyond celebration into measurable economic productivity.
Industry observers describe the programme as timely, aligning with national priorities on job creation, creative economy expansion, and sustainable tourism development. By embedding structure, performance metrics, and scalable business models into youth-led cultural projects, ATPN aims to move the sector above subsistence-level activity into investment-ready territory.
With the National Youth Cultural Initiative, ATPN positions culture not as nostalgia, but as infrastructure — a disciplined economic engine capable of creating jobs, preserving identity, and building generational wealth.
