FG launches youth entrepreneurship strategy

President Goodluck Jonathan on Tuesday launched the Youth Entrepreneurship Strategy (YES), an online portal serving as a common platform for all federal and state government’s diverse youth training entrepreneurship interventions. The portal, Nigeria Youth Entrepreneurship Network (NYENET.COM), is government’s collaboration with Nicholas Okoye, the founder of Empower Nigeria. This is even as the president declared the YouWIN programme a success, stating that it has so far recorded less than 10% failure rate. During the launch which held at the Banquet Hall of the Presidential Villa, Abuja, Jonathan said the broad based public-private platform is meant to speed up an already fast moving train of young entrepreneurs through government interventions that has created millions of additional jobs in the country. “This strategy will redefine the way we engage and support the empowerment and employment of our youths and women going forward”, the president said. He noted that this will be the first government in the history of Nigeria that will directly create 5,400 jobs through the YouWin programme. The president declared the YouWin programme a success, saying, “The success story is quite impressive, much more than what we expected. The failure rate is less than 10% from what the minister of finance briefed me and this is a success story”. He said he was proud to note that the first batch of 2500 entrepreneurs have created an average of 9 jobs each, making it a total of 22,000 jobs so far.