The federal government (FG) on Tuesday announced the proposed deployment of 50,000 non-graduate applicants in the N-Power volunteer programme.
The deployed applicants would be deployed in late September and trained in October according to the Presidential aide on job creation and youth empowerment, Afolabi Imoukhuede.
The applicants would be given three-month vocational trainings in seven disciplines and a nine-month apprenticeship in related industries.
He said, “Contracts were awarded as at end of June and as I speak now literally all contractors have delivered to the six zonal warehouses that we then appointed.
“So we have a warehouse for South South in Edo which is a gateway into South South, for South East we have a warehouse in Umuahia, for South West we have Lagos.
“For North East, we have Yola, for North West we have in Kaduna and for North Central, we have a warehouse in Abuja.
“These are zonal warehouses that have received tools for all the vocational trades from automobile to carpentry and all the seven disciplines.
“In addition to that the training consumables that the centres would also use to bring the volunteers to the level of industry competence were also procured and distributed in all the six zonal warehouses,’’ said the aide.
He said this was done so standards can be set and measured.
“So, there will be no case of the training being given out in Yobe different from the one in Kaduna or in Umuahia and also no question of some centres having consumables and others claiming they were not supplied,’’ he explained.
The presidential aide said that a centre assessment committee, with the Labour Minister as Chair and him as alternate chair, was set up early in the year to visit the zones.
He said that with the committee the N-Power team had actually gone around the country and picked again three states in each geopolitical zone plus Lagos and Abuja.
Accordingly, he said, that the training centres were now in 19 states and FCT, adding that all the centres are recommended for training and retreats across the country.
“What we are doing from here is to map the volunteers to these centres because we did take applications for the non-graduates last year.
“In 2016, we had 315,000 graduates and 301,000 non-graduate applications.
“Out of the 301,000 applications 124,000 of them were for the vocational trades in the seven disciplines,’’ Imoukhuede said.
