40,000 Young Women and Men in Nigeria Will Be Equipped Annually With Entrepreneurial Skills Through EDC Partnership With the Mastercard Foundation

The Nigerian Enterprise Development Centre (EDC) has developed a partnership with the Mastercard Foundation called the Transforming Nigerian Youths programme. Recognizing that employment is a pathway out of poverty, the programme seeks to create a network of entrepreneurial and managerial change-makers, particularly young people, and women across the Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) sector. This programme is open to all and aims to support 40,000 young people with the resources and learning required to start, grow, and expand their businesses. The programme will also provide support and resources to young people who want to become employable in the creative and agricultural sectors. In the last decade, Nigeria’s unemployment rate has continued to increase. According to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), the unemployment rate as of the second quarter of 2020 was 27.1%, or 21.7 m unemployed, of which 13.9m are young people.

Enterprise Development Centre (EDC) of the Pan-Atlantic University, a leading enterprise development Centre, has in the last 17 years, providing support services to thousands of SMEs through capacity building, advisory services, and partnerships with organizations that have an interest in the development of the SME sector in Nigeria. The intervention will scale EDC’s online learning capabilities to provide core business training to an even broader grouping of SMEs in the agricultural and creative sectors of the economy. It will also ensure that even the most marginalized, including young women in the north, can access this training.