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Minister of Labour and Employment, Senator Chris Ngige, has solicited the support of the European Union for the presidential pronouncement to lift 100 million Nigerians out of poverty in the next ten years.
Ngige made this request while addressing the seventh EU-Nigeria Ministerial Dialogue, held virtually, yesterday.
The minister said Nigeria needed the assistance of the EU in terms of empowering her youths through support for technical education.
“Our technical colleges need help so that they can produce people with skills. We have diversified the curricular and we now have to give our youths the skills that will enable them to use their hands and be empowered to become entrepreneurs,” Ngige said.
“In this area, we need the EU to support us and once they do that, they would have been buying into the presidential pronouncement of lifting 100 million Nigerians out of poverty in ten years.
“We need your full and total support especially to develop what we already have as areas of collaboration with the EU through the International Organisation for Migration (IOM).”
Regarding the issue of illegal migration, Ngige re-echoed the position of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) that those who were migrating to other countries were looking for means of livelihood.
According to him, those migrating illegally and those who are dying in the desert are in search of work, because they want work so that they could have income in their pockets and use their earnings to fight poverty and hunger.
“It is a triad. Illegal migration and poverty, they are all intertwined. There was a proposal earlier on from some EU countries, saying that they want to build skill centres here in Nigeria. Germany is doing something already from the GEZ.
“EU has also been supporting the IOM and IOM is working with Ministry of Labour and Employment and they have helped us to establish what we call job centres and migrant resource centres.
“The job centres are in the six geo-political zones of the country and the migrant resource centres are in Abuja, Lagos and Benin.”
