The government of Oyo State has hinted at plans to construct a comprehensive work plan spanning three main aspects in order to boost the state’s human capital development indicators.
Revd Idowu Ogedengbe, the governor’s executive assistant and focal person, made the announcement shortly after a technical session with top career officers in the state service and a consultant for the South West zone on human capital development.
The executive assistant listed health and nutrition, education, and job creation as some of the team’s other priorities, noting that interventions would be implemented as soon as a work plan was developed, leveraging on National Human Capital Development (NHDC) partners to improve the general well-being of the people of Oyo state.
He also alluded to the technical team’s financial challenges and how it planned to create a budget that would improve its administration and capacity to achieve its purpose.
Dr. Dayo Adeyanju, consultant in charge of the South West, stated that the National Human Capital Development (NHCD) initiative was launched in 2018 by the National Economic Council in response to the observed decline in Nigeria’s human capital development rating, and that Oyo state would benefit from the initiative.
The zonal consultant also emphasized the program’s goal of reducing poverty and developing sustainable policies, as well as increasing investment and improving human capital development indicators across the board.
He said: “For example, our means to be partakers of businesses whether it is awarded to somebody in Lagos or awarded to somebody in China, how do we ensure that our own indigenes and citizens, our residents have the opportunity to want to impact. It is very important. Then we are interested in technology transfer as well.
“When we bring in someone with skills, technology that will also how do we ensure that we organize it to a large extent among our people so that it won’t be a matter of a skill or technology is introduced, we do not have have the confidence to sustain it because our people are not skilled enough to manage it. So those are the things that we will need to consider to weigh up our labour force participation.
“Then funding on the part of the state , we will look at healthcare, education, even in term of entrepreneurial development and I think that Oyo State has been doing a lot in that regard by providing significant portion of our budget towards educating our people, towards developing our healthcare delivery system.
“We know also that the state cannot do everything. How can we ensure that we still also have funding to assist within the educational sector, within the healthcare institution. OYSHIA is doing well and we are also revealing the idea of the Oyo State Health Trustfund. That the people could possibly support our aspiration as a state using the resources there for the health of our people. We will consider that as well.
“Then we look at OYSIPA, even when our people we train them, we have cases of people; somebody cited the case of someone that was given a loan, and at the end of the day , I think it is the agency for Youth development. Money being given to some of our young people to go and try their business, at the end of the day ,how do we ensure money train and in the instance whereby we have been able to monitor the activities of some, there are some really that they cannot manage business on their own.
“They need to be trained and possibly given an opportunity, apprenticeship for them to develop the competence because running business requires a lot of courage, it requires a lot of devotion, it requires a lot of tenacity to be able to succeed.
“Some of our young people don’t have it , they want something that they start and start generating result, the moment that they face challenges, they just hands off. So We really want to help them, an agency like OYSIPA should be able to have a platform whereby we can have entrepreneurial development, developed on a large scale that they can pull the private sector to be part of training and giving them opportunity to work and earn a living, be funded also after they certify that they have the capacity because we release them to start driving their own entrepreneurship.
“So these are critical areas. And we even look at it to the point of those our technicians, our mechanics, artisans, the bricklayers, the builders, they are part of our economy. How do we ensure also that we don’t have quacks, we have been seeing cases of building collapsing. They have not been trained formally but they are also part of our economy.
“They are still building houses till now. So how do we ensure that instead of just focusing on those who will be trained from our universities, technical schools, how do we ensure also that these people that are being trained and they have some level of certification so if I am giving my vehicle to a mechanic, I can be sure that this mechanic will not add to the problem of my vehicle. They have the competence to fix it.
“I will also look at the issue of technical schools, in those days you cannot continue with your maybe primary school, maybe if you are not so good or interested in formal education, you won’t just have to drop out of school . You can drop out maybe from formal education and you can move into technical school where you go to. It is about what you can do with your lines, practicals. We can actually move some of our drop outs, instead of dropping out and becoming people roaming the street. We can move them from primary school to our technical school. So we need our technical schools to become awarded.
“The one we have currently , some of them are not equipped, they can’t even deliver the objective of training people in skill acquisition, we need to see what we can do about it. All these things are what we as technical working group will be looking into to ensure that we have the holistic approach to addressing the issue of healthcare, nutrition, addressing the issue of education and addressing the issue of labour force participation. How do we reduce unemployment among our young people . How do we ensure that young people are living productively. Our women and our men, our young boys and our young girls.
“So these are the things we considered at our last meeting and hopefully we should. Our Human Capital consultant for the Southwest will take us further on what we need to do in coming up with our work plan. The Work plan that is going to consist of our objectives, our target and also the next intervention thay we need, timelines to deliver our human capital development agenda. So thank you very much, we will be looking at the minute , highlight of the meeting before we move on to our human capital development agenda.”
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