The President, Association of Agricultural and Industrial Entrepreneurs of Nigeria AIEN, Chuku Wachuku, has said that raw materials-based clusters across the country has potential to create over 20 million jobs annually if it is effectively implemented .
Wachuku said the cluster initiative highlighted shared industrial facilities and would encourage value chain operators to manage limited resources, share expertise as well as operate and address common challenges including market, innovations, product improvement, among others at least cost.
According to him, it is a strategy intended to foster the development of value-added products from the abundant local resources, as well as encourage the establishment of viable small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that are adaptable to local contents’ development in Nigeria.
Wachuku who spoke in Lagos recently said the clusters initiative in the pilot stage was expected to create about two hundred and fifty entrepreneurs per cluster in every local government with the primary target being to create sixty thousand primary entrepreneurs.
He said the primary targeted pilot local government will involve sixty thousand members of the clusters, where each cluster will have two hundred and fifty people in two hundred and fifty hectares adding they will be producing crops of advantage in their area.
Meanwhile, the organisation is working with some banks and has reached an agreement and would finalise some arrangements, with an ecosystem that will guarantee recovery already in place.
Wachuku who was a former Director-General of Operations, National Directorate of Employment (NDE) and former National President, Nigerian Association of Small Scale Industrialists (NASSI) however urged the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to support the Deposit Money Banks who brought up products that will generate employment and give them interest buy back so that they could advance these money to the entrepreneurs who would create employment
“We are going to look at interest rates, I’m sure the CBN will also see the need to support these banks with low interest rates, right now what the CBN is doing is transferring the risk to the deposit money banks and not assuming any”, he expressed.