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By Joel Anekwe, Port Harcourt
The Nigerian Bottling Company (NBC) last Wednesday, in Port Harcourt held a three-day youth training workshop for 700 youths, designed to equip beneficiaries with technical and business management skills that would make them employable globally and able to run their own businesses.
The workshop, tagged ‘Youth Empowered,’ is part of the Coca-Cola Hellenic global initiative, which seeks to empower at least 500,000 youths, aged between 18 and 30, across Nigeria by 2020.
Participants at the programme, which ran from November 8 – 10, 2017, were shared among 40 volunteer mentors drawn from within and outside the NBC who would guide them through technical competences and entrepreneurial skills to make them competitive in the Labour market as well as able to successfully manage their own startups.
NBC’s Legal, Public Affairs and Communications director, Mrs Shade Morgan, explaining the rationale behind the programme, said NBC is bringing to Nigeria an international training targeting our youths”.
“In the programme we will be training them with those skills that would make them as employable as their peers in the United Kingdom and the United States”, she stated, adding “on top of that we are also teaching them business management skills because some of them are entrepreneurs and interested in starting their own businesses. Giving those skills that would enable them to run their startups successfully. So through this we intend to change the disturbing statistics we have that one in four of Nigerians are unemployed”.
She pointed out that what NBC has for the participants after training was more than starter packs as they would be matched with mentors who would follow them through the whole training programme guiding and assessing them to graduation.
“What you see here today is a three-day programme and after that they would be transferred to the online platform. They will also be motivated to compete. Then at the end of the programme they would now be empowered with the technical skills that really are missing from our curriculum today that is going to make them employable and able to run their own businesses”, Morgan explained.
On the budget for the programme and plans for sustainability the Director, Legal and Corporate said: “definitely this is a long term programme for us at NBC and we intend to do it for the next three years. So we have actually dedicated a lot of resources to that both in terms of time and people”.
She also expressed the appreciation of her company to the 40 mentors who volunteered their time to actually develop and empower the youths describing them as wonderful Nigerians.
Director of Employment, Napoleon Akpe, who represented the state commissioner for Employment and Empowerment, expressed the gratitude of the state government to Nigeria Bottling Company NBC for programme saying it was in agreement with the government plans for youth empowerment and employment generation.
He pledged the state’s government readiness to partner with NBC and other corporate organization which would approach the state government for such support and partnership.
