The Youth Cooperative and Enterprise Academy is an initiative of the African Youth Development Foundation aimed at jumpstarting socio-economic reforms among youths through massive enterprise development. The academy is the extension of our Business In You Talkshow, which is an aggressive campaign we launched recently to encourage young people create jobs for themselves instead of waiting for Gover
nment white collar jobs that do not exist anywhere, any more. For us in African Youth Development Foundation (AFRYDEF), we strongly believe that there is no better and faster way to create employment for the teeming unemployed youths in Nigeria than by encouraging enterprise development among them. All over the world today, enterprise development, which leads to private sector investments is being encouraged because that is the only engine that can drive the economy of any nation and grow it. In Nigeria, our youths have got abundant talents and skills and therefore need to be guided on how to build businesses around these skills, talents and passions. Some of these youths are already endowed with multi-million naira skills, such as: comedy, music, drama, modeling, photography, cinematography, graphic designs, writing, public speaking, poetry, blogging, consulting, facilitation, marketing, etc, and through the “Enterprise Academy”, we shall guide them on how to build their own businesses with these skills. Looking around us in Nigeria, we can see many youths who have become successful by building businesses this way. For example, Chimamanda Adichie has become successful and very popular by developing her skills in poetry and writing. Today, one of her novels, “Half of a Yellow Sun” has earned her international recognition and several awards. As a result, she did not only create a job for herself but for others, including her manager, publishers and others involved in publishing her works. These are simple truths we would like our youths to realize and begin to readjust in order to embrace entrepreneurship. To go with the Academy is a micro financing scheme, which we have carefully developed to enable unemployed young people register for any course of their choice in the Academy at a highly subsidized rate of five thousand naira (N5,000). It is a personal franchise that runs on an automated web based multilevel marketing software, which enables every youth that signs up to raise fund by inviting others as well as qualify for a course in the Academy, raise startup capital, win bonuses and other benefits over a 5 level simplified network system. With this scheme, all youths passing through this Academy will be graduating with a startup capital of two million (N2,000,000) naira, which will be enough for them to set up their various enterprises. Our technical team shall be involved in the disbursement and management of the startup capital to ensure that it is put into judicious use as expected. The team shall also provide technical support and supervision until each enterprise is established and well developed. We have worked out the plans and strongly believe that this is one of the surest strategies of creating jobs for the unemployed in Nigeria.
