IDRC Entrepreneurship Intervention in Nigeria Project
Funded by the International Development Research Centre(IDRC), the Centre for Gender and Social Policy Studies in partnership with the National Centre for Technology Management (NACETEM) are institutions coordinating the implementation of this project which will run from August 2019 to July 2021. The Project’s aim is to carry out an impact evaluation of Nigeria’s (and arguably Sub-Saharan Africa’s) largest apprenticeship-based entrepreneurship intervention. Private economic activity, particularly entrepreneurship, is known to reduce the burden of unemployment, which is currently one of Africa’s major development concerns. A dimension to this project is its analyses of policy approaches to promote gender-sensitive enterprises in Nigeria. Given the importance of gender dimensions to development, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, the project will undertake adequate gender analyses of entrepreneurship interventions to youth unemployment.
The Nigerian government, in 2012, introduced the Skill Acquisition & Entrepreneurship Development (SAED) program as a component of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) scheme. The NYSC is a mandatory one-year national service which about 300,000 Nigerian graduates under the age of 30 years, undergo annually. The SAED program, designed to promote entrepreneurship and employability among graduates, trains them for 3 weeks, and then provides an optional platform to take up apprenticeship and learn to run a business. This project hopes to determine whether this approach leads to a higher rate of new and high-quality business formation or not. If it does, then we can claim that an apprenticeship-based intervention is helpful in reducing the burden of unemployment in sub-Saharan Africa. Otherwise, a new approach needs to be designed. Ultimately, this project seeks to provide rigorous evidence that will help in improving existing employment intervention designs, and in developing future interventions.
CGSPS will handle critical tasks of Project Management, Desk Research, Data Collection, Gender Analyses, Impact Evaluation and Research Dissemination.
