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By Henry Uche
Towards reducing youths restiveness and social ills in the society, the SOS Children’s Villages Nigeria in collaboration with Children’s Villages Worldwide (CVW) in Germany has empowered 206 young people in Lagos in different skills acquisition.
Speaking during equipment handover ceremony, the Country Director of SOS Children’s Villages, Nigeria, Mr Eghosa Erhumwunse, said the project which took 24 months engaged young people drawn from all local government areas of the state in different trade skills: carpentry, hairdressing, data analysis, solar installation, tailoring, IT/ICT and website design, among others, which gulped €300,000.
With the theme, ‘Empowering Lagos Youths’, he affirmed that the project would be sustained since empowering children and young people is the group’s top priority. He assured that there are mechanisms to check and monitor the participants to avoid any form of fallout or abuse of the project exercise.
“We want to move young people away from poverty and enable them to become responsible to themselves and the society. We don’t want to see young people idle in the ugly situation of the society,” he said.
He expressed optimism that through such empowerment, young people would begin to think positively about themselves and the country hence the need for well-to-do Nigerians and groups to join forces to make the country habitable for all.
“The ideal is to provide them with opportunities for decent jobs and make them independent. Every participant is leaving here today with the requisite tools, machines and other different equipment fit for their respective trades to start something meaningful for themselves and add value to the society,” Erhumwunse said.
In a chat with Sunday Sun, one of the participants, Miss Ashogbon Goodness, an accountancy student at MIVA University, who was trained in data analysis, expressed gladness, saying: “I got the link through a relative, I didn’t pay a dime, I have little knowledge on data analysis. I am glad to have acquired more knowledge in data analysis, I will use this knowledge to help myself and even teach others. This is a dream come true, though I will keep learning because data analysis is a continuous process.”
