…Targets 10m jobs by 2028
From Uche Usim, Abuja
Norrenberger Financial Group, an investment company, says it has earmarked N500 million as grant to empower youth corps members with bankable business ideas seeking to turn their dreams to reality.
The Group Managing Director of the company, Mr Tony Ede, made the disclosure on Thursday at the company’s Entrepreneurship Fund Symposium themed: “Investing in Nigerian Youth to Drive Entrepreneurship: Opportunities and Challenges”.
According to him, the company has designed a stringent selection process to ensure beneficiaries are truly deserving of a slice of the fund.
He said: “The fund we are looking at is N500 million to start with. We’re looking at impacting 5,000 youths corps members this year and every other year going forward.
“We’re not just the ones doing this alone, we have our partners both multilateral and national partners, that are supporting us to reach this goal. We envisage that in five years, we would have impacted 1 million Nigerian youths and we’d have created about 10 million jobs”.
Ede added that research has shown that poor access to funding and the required skill set have remained major blights stunting the growth of Nigerian entrepreneurs.
“For MSMEs, there is a funding challenge. That is one part, but it’s not just about funding. I think there needs to be some level of knowledge and mental skill acquisition for these young entrepreneurs. If you look at the failure of entrepreneurs across Nigeria, every year, six out of 10 entrepreneurs fail.
“Another 40% fail because of lack of knowledge and the skills to push forward the ideas, right? So, what we’re doing is apart from creating capital, we are also creating an enabling environment that will allow these individuals to gain the kind of skills that they need to run their businesses. At the end of the day, we crown it all with capital, which is the fund that they need to power their ideas. And we’re saying that while we have limits to what we’re going to give to individuals, we have partners that can increase the funding where the ideas are so compelling. We have partners that will come on board and ensure that that idea comes to life. So, the onus falls on the individual, on the applicant to prove he’s our business idea for capital allocation”, he explained.
Also speaking, an official of the
Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN), Mr Onyima Alu, applauded Norrenberger for the effort to empower youth with skills and funds.
He revealed that between 2017 and 2021, over three million nano, micro, small and medium enterprises in Nigeria collapsed due to paucity of funds and other matters.
“We have identified the top three priority areas of assistance for businesses to include inability to access power and water, the issue of inability to access affordable funding, and then issues of illegal and multiple taxation.
“So, these are some of the major challenges that we have. And like I mentioned, because of this, most of our businesses, out of every 15 businesses that start, only five survive the first two years.
“Three out of the five are owned by women. And so we have this challenge that we’re hoping that through schemes like this, we’ll be able to address some of these challenges that cost a lot of the death of our enterprises”, he said.