The pervasive poverty, which has seen Nigeria surpassing India as the country with the highest number of poor people, calls for action plans on how entrepreneurship apprenticeship could lead the transition from consumption to production economy, writes GLORIA NWAFOR.

As technology disrupts the global economy, an increasing number of people are looking for work amidst rapid change that increases skill mismatches and job market tightness.
 

This, in turn, requires the development of new forms of training and learning.  While millions of young people in the developing world acquire skills through apprenticeships in the informal economy, in many countries in Africa, for example, they greatly outnumber youth acquiring skills through formal technical and vocational education and training. 
  
In Africa, especially, before the decolonisation of education, experts opined that unemployment was non-existent in precolonial, while apprenticeship ensured an inclusive system as all had something to do.
 
However, they argued that since the advent of colonialism, unemployment has risen while apprenticeships were reduced to a solution for the poor who couldn’t afford school.
 
Speaking on ‘Skills-Driven Entrepreneurship’, Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Lagos Business School (LBS), Dr. Henrietta Onwuegbuzie, said today, apprentices have jobs more steadily than graduates in the UK, Germany and even Nigeria, affirming that Africa had a superior system but abandoned it due to ideologies.
  
She spoke at the 21st yearly lecture and international leadership symposium by the Centre for Values and Leadership (CVL), where she lamented how the nation had a superior system but abandoned it due to ideologies.
  
Part of the problems she mentioned was that the country’s curriculum was still programming students for job-seeking when it should be developing them as job creators.
 
For most entrepreneurs, the don said despite that majority are not in school, they contribute about 50 per cent of the national Gross Domestic Product (GDP), contribute over 84 per cent of employment in Nigeria and account for 96 per cent of businesses in Nigeria.
 
Differentiating between traditional apprenticeship and mainstream academic output after four years, she said apprentices are trained to become business leaders, while the latter are trained to become jobseekers.  
 
Onwuegbuzie said there are constant innovations for traditional apprenticeship, which increases revenue and constant training which prevents business failure.
 
For mainstream academics, she said job security was not guaranteed, especially as multinationals are leaving the country, with higher start-up failure rate on raising funds, adding that innovation frequently is killed or delayed by bureaucracy.
 
Calling for a review of the curriculum of the nation, the don emphasised job-creation orientation over job-seeking, stating that apprenticeship not only creates jobs/capacity-building opportunities, but it also effectively creates a generation of entrepreneurs.
 
She said there was a need to have a mind reset by developing students to use their knowledge to solve problems and empower them to understand the principles of business success as well as be impact-driven, by training them to learn to make money from making a difference.
 
According to her, the wealthiest entrepreneurs in the world today are problem-solvers. Citing a poverty-value chain on why countries like Nigeria remain poor, she said the country was still dependent on buying and selling when it ought to be a producing nation.
 
She said countries will remain poor when no value is added, with wealth amidst problems and a rise in crime with no sustainable development. CVL founder, Prof Pat Utomi, said Nigeria must stimulate entrepreneurship for a global enterprise.
 
Citing instances where India has grown its nation through entrepreneurship, he urged that Nigeria should take a cue by pursuing latent comparative advantage along the value chains to compete in the global market.

 
“How do we look at our factor endowment and take the specific endowment that we want to become global leaders in those value chains and use limited industrial policy to stimulate the sector and facilitate young people to become producers in that sector,” he said.
 
The economist said one of the initiatives to drive entrepreneurship, which he said he has been labouring on, was to create industrial parks around the country with incubators, where diaspora investors and Nigerian entrepreneurs could bear through the use of blockchains to rev up entrepreneurship. 
 
If this is achieved, Utomi said it would create massive production updates and make Nigeria competitive in the global market space. He described entrepreneurship as one of the six sets of interdependent variables that drive sustainable growth and prosperity.  Utomi emphasised how entrepreneurship apprenticeship could prepare Nigeria for the imperative transition from consumption to production.
 
“Nigeria needs entrepreneurship impetus to take skill-driven entrepreneurship to build the nation’s economy. Nigeria may be an institution, but we have not built an institution of entrepreneurs. Nigeria must stimulate entrepreneurship for a global enterprise. The naira is the way it is because Nigeria does not produce. Nigeria must tap from India on entrepreneurship for economic development,” he added.
 
One of the panelists, President and Chief Executive Officer of Coscharis Group, Dr Cosmas Maduka, revealed how he passed through the apprenticeship cadre into becoming a successful businessman. 
  
According to him, apprenticeship taught him unprecedented discipline, stressing that there is no apprentice who judiciously engages in five years of training from his master does not end up being successful.
 
“Human capital is key to us. Characters must be built. Our focus should be on how we can bring people together to train them through apprenticeship and nurture them with the necessary skill set. We must support young entrepreneurs to help nations and businesses to be transformed,” he said.
 
Meanwhile, a new International Labour Organisation (ILO) Labour Standard on Quality Apprenticeships has focused new attention on the need to upgrade training and learning. 
 
A technical specialist on skills development, informal apprenticeships and the future of work in the ILO, Yasser Ali, hinted at how informal apprenticeships could deliver quality and relevant skills training that would align with labour market needs, especially, how countries work on national framework on an apprenticeship that covers all type of apprenticeship and work-based learning, including informal apprenticeship. 
 
“This approach entails improving both the learning process, supporting the enterprise, improving learning and enabling environment because improving the learning process alone through linking informal apprenticeship with formal education and a new training system could lead to improving the type of training and skill delivery and reduce the transition period from learning to employment,” he said.