From Job Seekers To Job Creators: How Far Can Youth Entrepreneurship Go?
By Solahudeen Olalekan Ridwanullah
INTRODUCTION
For over a century, countries across the world, including Nigeria, have decried the spiralling rate of unemployment. It was minimal in those days when higher education was a sure bet for employment. Not nowadays when a country like Tunisia records a 40% unemployment rate among graduates against 24% of non-graduates. This validates the presumption that entrepreneurship now gainfully employs more people than higher education does. Back home, in Nigeria, the population is estimated to be around 237, 527, 782 by 2025. A great figure, if well utilized with the innumerable natural resources—talk of the deep forest of Idanre, to the mysterious lake of Kanji and the rich Bentonite of Adamawa, can stabilize the country’s cyclical economy. However, its unemployment rate is in sharp contrast with this representation and falls drastically below expectations. Unemployment rates in some nations are already over 50% as apparent in North Africa, the Middle East and Southern Europe, where a generation of 100 million young people fail to connect with or gain from global growth (Future Agenda, n.d.). When one ponders on this, access to job(s) appears to be a rising barrier, and youth empowerment through entrepreneurship is the lasting solution we long for. In the subsequent paragraphs, this essay provides a detailed explanation of this stance.
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First, youth empowerment is a catalyst for sustainable economic development anywhere. In the second quarter of 2024, the youth unemployment rate in Nigeria, for instance, decreased to 6.50% from 8.40% which was recorded in the first quarter of the same year (National Bureau of Statistics, Nigeria, n.d). A personal survey shows that the reason for this development is arguably that, in the past years, more young people have ventured into Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises, accounting for 48% of the country’s GDP and 84% of the workforce employed. Supporting the growth of low-cost economic innovations like this will significantly reduce youth unemployment. This could be done through awareness campaigns about and adequate management of government interventions like the similitudes of the Cluster Development Support (CDS) for MSMEs, Conditional Grant Scheme for Micro Enterprises (CGS), and the Women in Self-Employment Programme (WISE-P) to promote growth, sustainability and competitiveness.
Second, the recent global adoption of e-commerce, especially in Nigeria, as occasioned by the stringent regulations that were enforced to curtail the COVID-19 pandemic represents a major shift in the local view of the word “entrepreneurship”. This view emanates from the mainstream belief that running a business must be predicated upon leaving one’s comfort zone in Ifón, for instance, hurrying through the daily heavy traffic on the ancestral Ojutu bridge and shining tinted teeth with customers along Dada Estate, different from the practice of marketing that is relatively remote, which is the new norm in today’s digital space. Many youths who once found marketing hectic and demanding as a result of individual social-cultural variation, say an introvert who lacks the social skills required for efficient marketing have now diversified and resolved to use social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and others to market their products either faced or faceless. It is noteworthy that many people also earn commissions as creators of digital product marketing on those platforms, albeit the products are not theirs. They simply showcase the seller to the buyer and get paid. That, also, is a form of entrepreneurship and should be promoted across the board.
Third, agricultural entrepreneurship, though regarded as stale in Nigeria by many, following the discovery of oil in 1956 at Oloibiri—the present-day Bayelsa State—and everything that transpired then which culminated into the reasoning behind the prevalent over-dependence on oil, can still be exploited and it will create jobs for a considerable number of Nigerians. Let us start by demystifying the myth that land is a must-have for everyone who intends to engage in agriculture. In this century? Notably, the level of sophistication that the world has attained in agricultural technology, today, can support a farming system that enables “agri|culture”—“land|cultivation” without the “agric”. The youth can be empowered through exposure to modern farming techniques such as hydroponics, organic gardening, and sack farming while promoting climate change adaptation and green entrepreneurship.
Furthermore, empowering youth through mentorship programmes towards becoming entrepreneurs will go a long way in mitigating unemployment. This is a training arrangement where young aspiring entrepreneurs are paired with experienced mentors who provide them with valuable insights and industry guidance. Notable instances of this are trainings organized by the government through the National Directorate of Employment (NDE), SMEDAN, NITDA, etc., where self-sustainable and low-capital skills such as painting, interlocking, tiling and other vocations are learned.
Lastly, Non-Governmental Organizations have also since recognized the power of youth entrepreneurship. The Tony Elumelu Foundation Entrepreneurship Programme, since its inception in 2015, has remarkably granted over 2.5 million young Africans access to training on its digital hub, TEFConnect and disbursed over USD$100 million in direct funding to support more than 21,000 young African men and women.
CONCLUSION
Extrapolating from the above, it is irrefutable that in order to jettison unemployment, youth involvement in entrepreneurship must be given an unstinting premium. If the government provides little to no-interest loans to business-oriented and talented individuals, while implementing a tax reform that is tailored to support growth and sustainability for startups by not only lessening the tax(es) paid by struggling businesses but also waiving the payment, where necessary, to avoid premature winding up, youth entrepreneurship will pursue unemployment to a point of extinction.
REFERENCES
Abdulrazaq, M. T. (2005b). Abdulrazaq: Nigerian Revenue Law.
Praise, J. (2025, April 22). Home. The Tony Elumelu Foundation. https://www.tonyelumelufoundation.org/#:~:text=Since%20the%20launch%20of%20the,have%20collectively%20created%20over%201.5
Rising youth unemployment (2025) – Future agenda. (2025, January 14). Future Agenda. https://www.futureagenda.org/foresights/rising-youth-unemployment/
SMEDAN Garment and Textile Cluster Growth Support Scheme. (n.d.). https://smedan.gov.ng/our-programs/gcss/
Trading Economics. (n.d.). Nigeria youth unemployment rate. https://tradingeconomics.com/nigeria/youth-unemployment-rate
United Nations. (n.d.). Youth | United Nations. https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/youth
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