From Isaac Anumihe, Abuja

As part of moves to reduce the unemployment rate in the country and promote financial literacy among the youths, Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), yesterday lunched, in  collaboration with the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) and the Heritage Bank, Youth Initiative Entrepreneurship Development Programme (YED-P) with  N3 million.

Launching the programme in Abuja, CBN Governor, Mr.  Godwin Emefiele, said the YED-P scheme was open to all serving youth corps members and post-youth corps members of not more than five years of graduation. With their certificates as collaterals, they are qualified to access the N3 million credit for business take-off.

This is as the bank gave out N300 million cash  and trophies to the winners of this year’s secondary school quiz  competition in Abuja who  were trained on financial literacy to celebrate the Global Money Week.

According to Emefiele, the apex bank is targeting not less than 10,000 youths as beneficiaries of its pilot scheme which is expected to take-off in a month’s time. More than  one million  direct jobs in the productive sectors are to be created within the next four years.

“The programme is expected to harness the latent entrepreneurial spirit of our teeming youths by providing timely and affordable credit to assist them in implementing their business ideas, particularly, the sectors that will engender growth and diversify our various aspects of life.  “This is expected to provide a sustainable mechanism to stimulate growth, reduce unemployment and contribute to addressing restiveness,” he said.

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We will make collateral requirement very simple to include assets such as academic and NYSC certificates, third party guarantees and other movable assets. The programme provides equal opportunity across gender and geo-political zones,” he said.

According to him, the bank, in conjunction with NYSC and Heritage Bank, has developed a robust operational framework to deliver a bias free pre-qualification and selection process, adding that a portal had been created to streamline the application process and ease back-end processes.

On the use of certificates as collaterals, Emefiele said,  “in  the Banking Act, when you grant loan, banks are expected to take collateral for any loan sum of more than N50,000 but because we are expecting that our youths, our NYSC  members and post-NYSC members should be able to access finance to develop their entrepreneurial skills, we felt that we should develop a very flexible way through which they can provide collateral for the loan they access under this programme. That is why we thought that their certificates are very important to them. NYSC certificates are very important to them because having those ones, I think they are good as a collateral. We believe that as youths who have been yearning for opportunities like this to raise finance at single digit rate and rather than wait to be employed, they become employers of labour. This should be an opportunity for us to open door for them, get finance and engage for life.”

However, Director General of NYSC, Brigadier General  Johnson  Olawumi, expressed happiness for CBN’s  initiative. He admitted that through the empowerment scheme such as Skill Acquisition and Entrepreneurship Development of NYSC over 500,000 ex-corps members would be trained in various agro-based skills.